Super HeSuan NB Goes to Beijing for the Imperial Exams: Can Hema's Hard Discount Model Smoothly Enter the Replication Phase?

Hema's hard discount format "SuperBox NB" is accelerating its national expansion.

Recently, SuperBox opened six stores simultaneously in Beijing, covering areas including Chaoyang, Changping, Tongzhou, Huairou, and other districts.

Low price is the first impression SuperBox NB wants to leave on Beijing consumers. 19.9 yuan per jin for golden pillow durian, 0.99 yuan per jin for watermelon, 16.9 yuan for 30 eggs, and 9.9 yuan for 24 bottles of mineral water—it launched with a price strategy.

As its first stop in North China, Beijing is positioned as SuperBox NB's core base. Future store expansion, supply chain construction, and warehouse network planning in North China will all radiate outward from Beijing.

Beijing is a challenging market. In the past, the hard discount format has long lacked strong players in Beijing, which itself indicates that this model is not easy to implement.

With relatively higher rents, more complex property conditions, and more fragmented consumption scenarios, SuperBox NB must not only sustain its low-price model but also re-test store density, site selection efficiency, and local supply chain capabilities.

SuperBox NB's front line continues to extend outward. Starting from East China, it entered South China, Anhui, and North China this year, and will soon land in Southwest China—SuperBox NB is moving from a regional format to national replication.

According to its plan, SuperBox NB aims to achieve a total of over 600 stores nationwide by the end of this year.

While many peers are still refining their regional single-store models, SuperBox NB has already pushed its battlefield nationwide. The question is, can scale further amplify its low-price advantage and support it in capturing a larger slice of the hard discount market?

Low-Price Mindset, Operational Subtraction

Walking into a SuperBox NB store, many middle-aged and elderly customers carry shopping baskets while comparing prices, lingering in front of the fresh food and hot food counters. These budget-conscious, family-centric consumers are exactly SuperBox NB's target audience.

SuperBox NB defines its target users as "pragmatic families"—people who consume rationally and value cost-effectiveness—and uses the nearby population that cooks at home as a key factor in site selection.

For such consumers, they need to stably purchase daily meals and essentials at lower costs and in less time.

Behind the low prices lies an operational and supply chain system built around efficiency.

Yue Sheng, head of operations management at SuperBox NB's headquarters, told Wall Street News/All-Weather Tech that SuperBox NB's store operations emphasize "removing all redundancy" and focus on continuously providing "high-quality but not expensive" products for daily meals.

This is first reflected in the product assortment.

SuperBox NB adopts a "broad categories, narrow items" product structure, with about 1,500 SKUs in the store, retaining only a few selected products under each subcategory.

Compared to traditional supermarkets that cover more demand with a wider range of SKUs, SuperBox NB focuses its limited space and inventory on high-frequency items.

Private labels and exclusive products are crucial support for this narrow product range to work.

Currently, its private label products account for nearly 60% of the assortment. This means SuperBox NB does not just compress upstream procurement costs but also participates more deeply in product definition, using private labels to strengthen its low-price mindshare and differentiate its offerings.

At the same time, it retains many co-branded or customized exclusive products with established brands, such as Nestlé KitKat chocolate, Hsu Fu Chi pineapple cakes, Snow Beer, and Xinxiangyin tissues.

For SuperBox NB, which has just entered the Beijing market, such products can reduce consumers' unfamiliarity with low-priced goods, avoid the assortment becoming overly "white-labeled," and create a buffer between low prices and trust.

According to Mas, head of frozen, refrigerated, and dry goods procurement at SuperBox NB, in developing private labels, SuperBox NB aims to reconstruct the cost chain from factory to shelf, removing brand slotting fees, some intermediate logistics costs, and marketing expenses, to restore the true cost of the product.

Specific implementations include: first, controlling raw material costs through direct sourcing from bases and origin warehouses; second, for products with high logistics costs such as cooking oil, paper products, and dairy, finding suitable factories near cities to reduce transportation costs; third, relying on store scale growth to spread out the costs of product development, procurement, and distribution.

SuperBox NB attempts to strip away the costs absorbed by channels, marketing, and multi-layer distribution from product prices, then reallocate them through scaled stores and high-turnover products.

The "subtraction" approach extends to store operations.

For example, store decoration and display are more restrained, and shelf spacing is tighter, basically allowing only two shopping carts to pass side by side.

Yue Sheng introduced that the stores emphasize red signs on white walls, bright lighting, and prominent signage, so customers can quickly find products and complete purchases. SuperBox NB rarely uses promotional slogans like "Today's Special" or "Limited-Time Discount," instead emphasizing stable low prices and using paper price tags extensively rather than electronic ones.

If prices don't fluctuate frequently, there's no need for frequent price changes and promotional maintenance, reducing store operational complexity.

A typical SuperBox NB store is staffed by about 15 to 20 people, and employees are not limited to a single function but cover multiple roles such as stocking, organizing, picking, packing, and selling simultaneously.

Digitalization takes over some judgments that were previously reliant on manual experience. SuperBox NB combines weather, urban consumption habits, and historical sales data for automatic ordering and replenishment to ensure stable supply of daily essentials for community residents.

These designs ultimately serve SuperBox NB's determination to enter community retail with stable low prices.

Leaving the East China Comfort Zone

Hard discount is a business of scale and regional networks. Only when stores are dense enough can procurement, warehousing, distribution, fulfillment, and brand mindshare be amortized. This is the challenge SuperBox NB must face as it aims for national expansion.

It is no coincidence that hard discount first gained traction in East China, especially Shanghai.

The East China market has sufficiently dense family consumption scenarios, a mature Yangtze River Delta supply chain, and intense retail competition. Consumers here accept quality consumption and are willing to reallocate shopping channels for stable low prices.

During cross-city expansion, SuperBox NB must first adjust its product assortment based on the dietary habits, consumption preferences, and supply chain conditions of different cities.

SuperBox NB revealed that about 30%-40% of its Beijing stores stock localized products, similar to the ratio in South China.

For short-shelf-life vegetables, low-temperature dairy, and other products sensitive to freshness and taste, SuperBox NB uses local or short-distance supply chains more; for relatively easy-to-store items like potatoes, tomatoes, and carrots, it emphasizes cost at origin and supply chain efficiency.

But supply chain efficiency depends not only on procurement capability but also on store density. The same low-price model naturally operates less smoothly in early-stage North China than in the already scaled East China market.

The six stores initially opened in Beijing are mostly located within community living radiuses, covering areas such as Chaoyang, Changping, Tongzhou, and Huairou. These include community-style retail, neighborhood centers, and small commercial complexes—some are even built on the second floor of municipal farmers' markets.

Yunchou, head of development and site selection at SuperBox NB, said that consumer habits, business environments, and property conditions vary significantly across regions, and SuperBox NB is still testing community consumption needs in different scenarios.

Currently, SuperBox NB and Hema Fresh operate independent warehousing and distribution systems. "Beijing is the base camp in North China. How the North China market develops will be more considered from density and breadth, but the premise remains warehouse network planning," Yunchou said.

"Extreme convenience" is SuperBox NB's first principle for site selection. Stores don't necessarily need to be in the busiest, largest commercial complexes, but they must be in the most convenient locations for consumers.

In terms of store format, SuperBox NB currently focuses on two sizes: 600 square meters and 800 square meters.

In core urban areas with scarce property and higher rents, stores tend to be compact street-side shops of about 600 to 650 square meters; in community neighborhood centers or small community malls, larger stores of around 800 square meters are deployed to serve as regional flagship anchors.

Kevin, founder of Shushuo Retail Case Library, told All-Weather Tech that SuperBox NB's expansion does not start from scratch. It stands on the foundation of Hema's over a decade of experimentation across multiple brand lines, including Hema X Member Store, accumulating both failures and successes as a foundation.

Just by scale, SuperBox NB already leads in the hard discount format.

As of now, SuperBox NB's store count has reached 550. The second-ranked ALDI has only 108 stores, all concentrated in Shanghai and Jiangsu; the third-ranked Meituan Happy Monkey, which entered the hard discount field less than a year ago, has only 40 stores.

The urgency for national expansion stems partly from the competition for offline locations under the overall framework of community retail competition. High-quality locations are still scarce, and it is necessary to occupy consumers' daily replenishment radius first.

On the other hand, expansion itself is also part of building backend supply chain capabilities.

Categories such as snacks, beverages, paper products, grains and oils, daily chemicals, frozen standard products, and pre-packaged foods have relatively small regional differences, longer shelf lives, and lower spoilage rates, making them easier to standardize in specifications, procurement, and pricing.

What SuperBox NB needs to achieve is a hard discount flywheel: the more stores it has, the larger the single-item procurement volume, the more it can negotiate lower prices and customized products from suppliers; lower procurement costs and improved profits can then support continued store expansion, spreading the same product assortment and supply chain to more communities.

From this perspective, the Beijing opening is not a simple regional move but a critical test for SuperBox NB to transition from an East China advantage market to national replication.

For the entire hard discount industry, the national war has only just begun.

Risk Warning and Disclaimer

Market risk exists, invest cautiously. This article does not constitute personal investment advice and does not consider the specific investment objectives, financial situations, or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article are suitable for their specific circumstances. Invest based on this at your own risk.