A hot spot for fresh snacks—stuck between high turnover and high losses

On July 8, the leading fresh snack brand Jinli Men from Changsha opened its first store in the South China region at Shenzhen Longgang Mixc.

Although it was a workday, customers had been coming into the store continuously since 8:00 a.m., including many people who came specifically to check in.

On-site staff shouted for people to try samples, carrying freshly made milk tea, potato chips, and konjac noodles—low-priced items. Shopping baskets were quickly filled with baked goods, braised flavors, and packaged snacks. Local Shenzhen media even described the first day’s foot traffic as “queueing until the system crashed.”

Such a scene is already nothing new in Jinli Men’s hometown of Changsha.

At Changsha South Railway Station, it’s easy to see young travelers dragging suitcases and carrying Jinli Men paper bags. It is transforming from a popular snack shop into a city souvenir for items like tea drinks and Hunan-style foods.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

From Changsha to Shenzhen, the fresh snacks represented behind Jinli Men have also started entering more core shopping malls across the country. Sitting at the intersection of food service and retail, this format is becoming a new foot-traffic entry point at the B1 level of malls.

It looks like an upgrade to a traditional stir-fry snack shop or a bulk snack retailer, but in reality it is a recombination of baked goods, tea drinks, braised snacks, stir-fry snacks, and Sam’s Club-style bestsellers:

Instead of scattering instant-consumption demand across different formats, concentrate it into a relatively streamlined set of product inventory.

What attracts capital to fresh snacks is never just “freshness” itself, but a business model that can balance high foot traffic, fast turnover, and chain replication.

However, this model also rests on high rent, high staff efficiency requirements, high spoilage, and efficient supply chains.

What consumers perceive is freshness; what brands compete on is always efficiency—this is the real threshold for fresh snacks.

A new product species built from it

At noon on a weekday, on the basement level of Beijing Chaoyang Joy City, young crowds that just exited the subway weave through the corridor.

At the front of a Yili store, a checkout line bends into the store. In its first month after opening, this store achieved monthly revenue of 6.2 million yuan.

What draws the crowd is a kind of compound sensory stimulation.

Before even reaching the entrance, a sweet aroma of freshly stir-fried chestnuts and roasted sweet potatoes drifts through the air. Outside the store, there are display areas with mulberry drinks, freshly baked sweet potato chips, and fruit yogurt sandwiches. Beside them is an ice-cream machine with chestnut flavor.

As you go deeper, nuts, fruit preserves, freeze-dried yogurt, low-temperature cakes, freshly made milk tea, and freshly baked meat strips are combined into one inventory set. It looks like a snack shop, and also like a bakery shop, a tea drink shop, or a stir-fry snack shop.

Yili’s baking racks and large ovens line up right behind the cash register. Standing in front of the open display area, consumers can directly see staff sending rows of sweet potatoes and chestnuts into the oven. And in front of the low-temperature cake and fruit preserve counters, staff keep cutting new items and handing them to customers who stop to try samples.

Brand consulting expert and columnist author Zhai Bin from Hongcan.com believes this is a variation of the “food and retail integration” trend in recent years.

The store brings processing steps that used to be hidden in the central kitchen or back-of-house to the front of the consumer experience. By using open-display baking and high-frequency tastings to create a made-to-order feel, it naturally drives sales of weighed goods such as nuts, fruit preserves, and freeze-dried items.

“So-called fresh snacks are just adding a lot of ‘food’ logic on top of retail,” Zhai Bin said.

Chai Jingzhong, founder of Wuxian Innovation Capital, summarized it as “a collection of bestsellers.”

Milk tea, baking, stir-fry snacks, braised flavors, and snacks are not entirely new categories. But once their barriers are broken and they are recombined into one store, they form a new instant-consumption scenario.

This kind of play is not uncommon in the industry.

Another leading brand, Jinli Men, is known as the “mini Sam’s Club.” It borrowed Sam’s Club’s fresh-food bestseller approach and “small-packaged” items that are normally for family-size and large portions—such as Swiss rolls and mochi-like crusts.

“An enormous Sam’s Club cake is cut here into one-person portions. The stuff is still the same, but the scenario becomes a snack you can grab and take away,” Chai Jingzhong summarized it as: “snackification of food service.”

Fresh snacks didn’t invent many new products; they mainly changed how products are combined, portioned, and sold.

When old and new formats are placed within the same mall, this difference becomes especially obvious.

In Beijing Chaoyang Joy City B1, the traditional premium stir-fry snack brand Xueji Stir-fry is only two storefronts away from Yili. The freeze-dried yogurt, milk date snacks, and fruit dried goods that were once seen as Xueji’s signature are now sitting on Yili’s shelves twenty meters away.

In the same afternoon, Xueji also set up displays outside the door—offering sweet potato chips and persimmon chips to invite samples—but there were few customers at the front. Xueji also has ovens, but they are hidden deeper in a corner behind the store, and you can hardly see any sign of operation during quiet hours.

In the past, Xueji was often joked about by consumers as a “Xueji jewelry store” because the total checkout amount could easily be dozens of yuan higher; as a result, some voices in the industry believed the popularity of fresh snacks was a form of “consumer downgrade” from relatively premium stir-fry brands.

Research from ShuShuo Retail Case Library shows that the typical transaction value (per customer) for traditional premium stir-fry snacks is usually between 80 yuan and 150 yuan, while fresh snacks are around 45 yuan to 60 yuan.

From unit prices, both are basically in the same price band. Yili’s cheese date snacks are 46 yuan per jin, while Xueji’s date snacks are 43.8 yuan per jin. The freeze-dried yogurts from both brands are 138 yuan per jin, and the prices of cashews and daily nuts are also not far apart.

When the same—or even slightly higher—unit pricing is placed inside a fresh snack store, consumers’ sense of “it’s expensive” disappears mainly because of “total-price control” brought by small packaging, along with the “fresh-made bonus” dispersed on-site.

Previously, consumers might have been willing to pay for the “scarcity, quality, and expensive” ingredients—but today they’re more willing to pay for instant experiences they can see, such as “freshness you can see,” “short shelf life,” and “fewer additives.”

Turnover powers “freshness”

What consumers feel as “freshness” at fresh snack stores is more accurately a product perception formed by short shelf life, low-temperature display, transparent packaging, and some on-site processing.

For store operations, the real challenge is how to maintain this sense of freshness while bearing a certain level of waste and spoilage.

Yili’s freshly made milk tea is recommended to be consumed on the same day; the shelf life of freshly baked meat jerky is about 3 days; and fruit yogurt sandwiches can only be stored for a few hours. If you look only at the shelf life of these driving-star products, the management difficulty of inventory turnover in this retail format is no less than that of fresh produce retail clearance.

But fresh snacks are not a store where every single item is “fresh.”

In the mid-to-back stage of a Yili store, large quantities of traditional fruit dried goods, nuts, and roasted fish slices with shelf lives of up to 9 to 10 months are still on display. These items help widen the inventory assortment, provide stable supply, and contribute relatively steady gross margin.

This “short-shelf-life items at the front to draw traffic, long-shelf-life items at the back for profit” model is not unique; it is standard inventory assortments for the fresh snack industry.

Research by Huachuang Securities on Jinli Men stores shows that in its sample stores there are 139 SKUs in total. Among short-shelf-life, high-frequency categories—such as fruit, drinks, baking, and braised flavors—those with a shelf life of 1 to 5 days make up 46.1% and are expected to contribute over 60% of sales.

On the wall of Jinli Men stores, it says: “We believe that only by selecting SKUs and continuously improving turnover speed can we achieve freshness with short shelf life.”

“Broad categories with narrow SKUs, selecting SKUs, and building bestsellers” is the product logic widely used by Sam’s Club, Costco, and discount retail.

The more simplified the SKU set is, the more concentrated unit sales will be. It becomes easier to form procurement and production scale, and it also becomes easier to predict ordering and replenishment.

But fresh snacks push this logic to the more extreme side.

Once short-shelf-life items don’t sell fast enough, they quickly turn into spoilage. Therefore, turnover not only affects costs and efficiency—it directly determines whether “freshness” can truly hold.

An investment research report from Orient Securities shows that the average spoilage rate in the fresh-made snack industry is about 8% to 15%, clearly higher than the roughly 1% to 3% seen in traditional packaged snack and bulk snack stores. To absorb this spoilage, stores must continuously obtain enough foot traffic.

Compared with fresh produce, snacks are not a strict necessity in the economic sense.

To maintain high-frequency sales, fresh snacks often need to enter locations like malls and high–commercial-value neighborhoods, and attract consumers to stop through stronger displays, tastings, and on-site processing.

This makes it hard for this format to be made “light” like traditional bulk snack stores.

Besides cold cabinets, ovens, and processing equipment, stores also need more employees to handle making, organizing, replenishment, tastings, and spoilage management. As Zhai Bin observed, the Yili Beijing store’s employee count is likely above 30.

A Yangtze Securities research report shows that the gross margin of fresh snacks is about 30% to 40%, and some stores’ net profit margin calculations even reach 15% to 25%, apparently significantly higher than bulk snack stores.

But profitability levels do not come only from high gross margins; they are built on stable foot traffic, continuous bestseller output, and fast turnover.

Once turnover slows down, short-shelf-life products first turn into spoilage, and high rent and heavy staffing are also difficult to contract at the same pace.

High gross margin does not naturally equal high profitability; it is more like a necessary condition for sustaining this heavy-operations model.

National expansion starts early

In 2025, Jinli Men’s explosion of popularity attracted the entire industry’s attention, and thereafter fresh snack stores mushroomed. Just a year later, there were no fewer than 20 new brands crowded into the segment.

Among listed companies alone, there is YIwei Food testing “YIwei fresh snacks,” and Mingming Hen Mang launching “You·Recommended.” Three Squirrels cooperated with RT-Mart to open fresh snack “in-store stores” (shop-in-shops).

Traditional braised-flavor snack companies, bulk snack retailers, and branded snack enterprises all began entering this segment by leveraging their existing supply chains and store resources.

This wave of hype quickly became crowded, and one key reason is that the replication barrier for first stores is relatively weak.

Most of the products and operating capabilities that fresh snacks need were already developed and matured within the major established chain formats.

Chai Jingzhong told All-weather Technology that especially in Changsha, this is even more so. In baking and milk tea, there are ready-made category stars and infrastructure. “This level of maturity attracts a large number of chain ‘regulars’ with food-service and retail genes to cross over and retrofit.”

With low barriers and many entrants, controversies about homogenization arrived especially quickly. Different brands may appear to have broad assortments, but in reality they still revolve around milk tea, baking, nuts and fruit dried goods, as well as meat strips and braised flavors.

Zhai Bin believes the space for category differentiation in fresh snacks has already nearly been filled. “For things related to snacks and ready-to-eat foods, basically it’s just these. You can’t really go fry dishes. In the future it will inevitably shift to competition in the supply chain.”

In his view, the industry’s endgame will be similar to fresh-made tea drinks: evolving into low gross margin, high volume businesses driven by supply chains. Brands will need to obtain profits by building their own supply chains or deeply integrating them.

Kevin, the chief creator of the ShuShuo Retail Case Library, also holds a similar view: product homogenization is a problem to be addressed later, and product differentiation innovation is a long-term ongoing process. For the industry right now, the top priority is still shaping locations, brands, and supply chains.

With limited space for front-end innovation, plus the relative scarcity of “high–energy locations” like mall B1 levels that fit the spread of fresh snacks, this directly forces this young format—just born one or two years ago—to fire its cross-regional nationwide expansion cannon early.

Relying on the restaurant chain group “Black Classic,” Duojquan—currently one of the few brands in the industry that has publicly opened franchising and provides a clear expansion timetable—plans to add 600 to 1,000 stores in 2026, directly targeting a scale of 1,000 stores.

However, people close to Duojquan revealed to All-weather Technology that some franchised stores in other regions failed to meet expectations due to location and local factors, and even struggled to outperform mature traditional stir-fry snack stores in the area. Duojquan is in fact very cautious in reviewing franchising conditions and opening regions.

In contrast, Jinli Men, viewed as the brand with the most stable store-level unit sales and profitability performance, has chosen another path in its nationwide expansion.

Industry assessments say Jinli Men’s monthly store sales can reach 2 million yuan. While it currently has only a little over 20 stores—lagging behind Yili and Duojquan, which have already broken 100 stores—its intention to accelerate nationwide expansion is becoming clear.

In April 2026, Jinli Men set up a subsidiary in Shenzhen as the main entity for the South China layout. Starting in May, the brand repeatedly announced first stores in cities such as Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou, and placed its South China flagship first store in Shenzhen Mixc.

Chai Jingzhong told All-weather Technology that Jinli Men’s headquarters has moved from Changsha to Shenzhen. On the one hand, this is to leverage South China’s talent and supply chain resources; at the same time, Shenzhen is also an important location for China Resources Commercial resources, which provides Jinli Men with more opportunities to enter projects like Mixc City and Mixc Plaza in the future.

Meanwhile, Jinli Men has also started building factories in East China and South China to provide short-shelf-life production and distribution capabilities for cross-regional expansion.

“Opening only a few stores sporadically in other places, without regional factories to support, makes it hard to establish long-term competitiveness,” Chai Jingzhong believes. “Even if some small brands enter top commercial complexes at a certain stage, they may still be replaced in later competition due to insufficient supply chain and scale.”

Hesitation and watchful waiting

Financing rumors about leading fresh snack brands have already appeared. Market talk says the A-round valuations for Jinli Men, Duojquan, and Yili are in the range of 2 billion to 3 billion yuan. However, the related deals have not actually taken shape for a long time.

Behind this could be hesitation on both the brand side and the capital side.

The “newness” of fresh snacks comes from a recombination of multiple categories, including milk tea, baking, stir-fry snacks, braised flavors, and snacks.

Over the past few years, these formats have largely already demonstrated—separately—the paths of traffic dividends fading, homogenization intensifying, and capital-driven overexpansion of stores.

Capital is not that it can’t see the operating model behind fresh snacks; rather, it is that it is not unfamiliar with the likely endgame it might reach.

Industry participants also know clearly that this isn’t a business where the winner-takes-all can be achieved simply by burning money to expand and accumulate scale.

Kevin believes, as with hard discount retail, the core of long-term competition in fresh snacks is still efficiency. Only by forming sufficient procurement scale and product capability can a brand create a more competitive cost advantage. Simply relying on squeezing suppliers’ pricing or extending payment terms cannot form stable bargaining power.

In his view, fresh snacks’ long-term core moat lies in product R&D and private brands. Brands need to participate in formulating recipes, specifying product standards, and setting quality benchmarks—to improve the hit rate of bestsellers—while also building a set of operating rules that can be replicated across stores.

These capabilities cannot be obtained in a short time purely through financing; they must be accumulated gradually through long-term operations. “But external funding has a cost. If you insist on steadily opening stores slowly, and the store-level profitability model cannot be repeatedly verified, then the capital’s payback cycle will be extended,” Kevin said.

For leading brands like Jinli Men, finding a balance between scale and stability is an important background factor behind why financing has yet to land.

The single-store model for fresh snacks may already be taking shape at least initially, but there is still a long way to go toward stable replication.

Running multiple categories alongside short shelf-life products places higher requirements on the supply chain and store operations. Among them, food safety and shelf-life management are the most direct pressure tests for this expansion system.

In January 2026, Jinli Men paid a high price in the food safety process.

A “Lemon acid spicy boneless chicken feet” produced on a commissioned basis was exposed for illegal secondary repackaging. The implicated contract manufacturer also had problems such as environmental cleanliness, improper arrangement of utensils, and nonstandard staff operations.

Jinli Men then admitted that secondary repackaging violated food safety regulations and announced “pay ten times per box” for the 64,031 boxes of products sold since November 1, 2025, preparing 12 million yuan in专项赔付 (special compensation funds).

All-weather Technology also observed in a Yili store that non-same-day fresh-made products, such as monkfish slices and shrimp chips, are packed and sub-divided using transparent packaging. However, the packaging itself does not print specific production dates; instead, the date and shelf life are uniformly displayed by the price tags placed in front of the counter.

A store employee, when explaining the date on the price tag, said that although the label shows April, since “everything gets sold quickly every day,” it can be considered as May. The shelf life of the freshly ground peanut butter is one month, while the production date is handwritten by the employee.

These details show that fresh snacks still have room for further standardization in shelf-life labeling and store execution.

If operational flaws at the single-store level are copied across hundreds of stores, they may be multiplied many times.

For brands that treat “freshness” and “short shelf life” as core selling points, food safety is not an additional capability—it is a prerequisite for the entire business model to stand.

Ultimately, fresh snacks attract consumers through experience, but underneath it all is still an efficiency-management model similar to fresh-produce discount retail.

Until this capability is fully validated, fresh snacks remain a business where the single-store spotlight is strong but the nationwide playbook is still far from clear.

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