Mingming's busy emotional retail growth logic: run good stores, open more stores, fill the shelves with products

Ask AI · Why can snacks become the top choice for low-cost emotional comfort?

Text | Dong Erqian

Editor | Yang Xuran

In 2018, Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng proposed to build the company as a combination of “Costco + Disney,” which the market mostly regarded as a narrative technique aimed at the capital market.

But to this day, Pinduoduo’s unique moat has been proven by the market, and the “entertainment attribute” contained within the retail industry has been truly uncovered.

In the retail sector, Costco represents the cost-performance ratio brought by extreme efficiency, while Disney symbolizes the joy of non-purposeful shopping. This deep integration of efficiency and happiness not only shines in e-commerce but also begins to reshape category patterns in offline retail markets.

The greatest common divisor carrying the happiness of shopping for the masses is the seemingly inconspicuous snack. It inherently possesses the potential for explosive products, high frequency, essential needs, and resistance to cycles. Under the current market environment, the average transaction per customer at snack supermarkets can usually reach 30-40 yuan, making it the “emotional comfort consumer product” with the lowest consumer entry threshold.

Whether it’s white-collar workers in first-tier cities or children in remote towns with limited supplies, the happiness brought by snacks is hardly different.

For a long time, this universal demand was not fully unleashed by the market. The main suppressing factor came from multiple layers of loss in the product circulation chain.

As a Chinese-style efficiency revolution, the bulk snack model emerged in this mismatch between demand and supply. It is not simply about selling snacks but achieving a fair cost-performance ratio through a minimal chain of “direct supply from manufacturers, eliminating middlemen.”

When the threshold for a decision of happiness is lowered enough, snack stores are no longer just places to buy things but become “offline mood supply stations” that provide emotional value, like Disney.

As the leader in this track, Mingming Very Busy’s 2025 performance report also provides evidence: last year’s revenue reached 66.17 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 68.2%; net profit even grew by 180.9% to 2.33B yuan. By the end of last year, the total number of stores increased to 21,948, covering about 75% of counties nationwide.

Behind a series of hardcore data lies the most authentic background of China’s retail market: As long as you can provide happiness at extremely low cost with maximum efficiency, there is no ceiling to growth.

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01 Experience Flywheel

A notable pattern in the retail industry over the years is that behind every emerging business model, there is almost always an improvement in supply chain efficiency and a precise compensation for consumers’ emotions—both are indispensable. The bulk snack retail model is no exception.

According to estimates by CICC International, for a long time, the circulation of snacks in China heavily depended on the traditional “brand—multi-level distributors—retail terminals” deep sales system, with multiple markups leading to inflated terminal prices, with markup rates reaching 1.6 times or more.

The bulk model can compress the overall channel markup rate to about 1.3 times through a minimal chain of “factory direct procurement—central warehouse—stores,” returning the expensive shelf fees and middleman profits of traditional supermarkets to consumers.

When snacks of the same quality are priced 20%-30% lower than in traditional supermarkets, this superior cost-performance ratio quickly breaks through the consumption defenses of first- and second-tier white-collar workers and county families, restoring snacks from occasional purchases to high-frequency essential consumption.

If efficiency improvements solve the “saving” problem, then store experience more addresses the “joy” need.

Today’s social pace is turning snack consumption into a universal emotional release. Recognizing this reality, Mingming Very Busy quickly began to create a “joyful, comfortable shopping experience.”

From the product selection logic, each Mingming store maintains at least 1,800 SKUs, with hundreds of new products added monthly. It is understood that about 80% of Mingming’s products differ significantly from traditional supermarkets and other retail channels, continuously attracting consumers with high freshness and novelty. Meanwhile, bulk weighing modes allow consumers to enjoy the thrill of selection at extremely low costs (even just buying a piece of candy), greatly reducing psychological pressure.

In terms of store atmosphere, warm lighting, standardized displays, and frequent in-store interactions make shopping for snacks a mundane activity that can also become a low-cost emotional outlet.

Just like the rise of tea drinks and trendy toys before, snack bulk stores are actually meeting consumers’ shopping needs while providing an easily accessible emotional supply—an experience of flow that allows them to temporarily forget worries. For companies, this can be called a flywheel effect between consumer experience and business performance.

The growth of these companies’ performance is a true vote from Chinese consumers for this low-cost happiness.

02 Certainty of Growth

Mingming Very Busy’s latest disclosed performance report is the most direct proof of this logic.

Data not only sketches the rise of a giant but also reveals how the snack bulk model, through cycling periods, turns low-decision thresholds of happiness into highly certain financial growth.

Last year, Mingming’s revenue and profit both soared year-on-year. The full-year revenue reached 66.17 billion yuan, up 68.2%; gross profit margin improved from 7.6% in 2024 to 9.8%.

More noteworthy is Mingming’s continuously improving and still improvable balance sheet. In 2025, prepayments, deposits, and other receivables totaled 1.9 billion yuan, down 5.24% year-on-year. This was the first time since 2022 that the total prepayments decreased, reflecting a significant strengthening of its bargaining power over upstream suppliers.

By the end of 2025, accounts payable and notes payable stood at 1.18B yuan, down 21.26% year-on-year, also marking the first decline since 2022. This change not only indicates that Mingming’s payment terms with upstream suppliers are continuously optimized but also shows the company’s shift from pursuing scale to focusing on operational quality, actively building a more efficient and healthy collaborative ecosystem with upstream partners, striving to create a high-efficiency, win-win food retail platform.

Additionally, in retail, increasing store density usually leads to the dispersal of per-store revenue and profit, along with structural risks of store closures. But Mingming’s data shows a very counterintuitive resilience.

By the end of 2025, the total number of stores had surged to 21,948. Surprisingly, the number of closed franchise stores in 2025 (265) was even lower than in 2024 (273).

This high loyalty and survival rate of franchisees prove that its single-store model has strong vitality in both sinking markets and high-tier cities. It can be said that the demand for snacks as the largest common denominator is broader than imagined.

The high turnover of bulk models does not come out of nowhere; it is backed by core assets composed of a massive membership base. Currently, Mingming’s registered members have exceeded 200 million. In the first three quarters of 2025, total orders reached 2.13B, averaging nearly 8 million consumer visits daily.

This high-frequency interaction based on superior cost-performance and emotional gains allows each store to maintain a high daily order volume of 481 orders.

Mingming Very Busy** is reconstructing scattered, impulsive snack consumption into a high-frequency, stable lifestyle—something that previous small supermarkets and online retail platforms could not achieve and cannot do now.**

03 Further Space

A deeper look at Mingming’s explosive performance in 2025 reveals that its essence is a generational replacement of traditional inefficient channels by extremely efficient supply chains.

Standing at a new starting point in the industry, its future growth logic will no longer rely solely on physical space expansion but will shift toward deeper exploration of the genuine, solid market fundamentals. In other words, people can still do more and better consumption on the already built offline consumption infrastructure.

As a higher-frequency, more inclusive consumption, snacks continue to release stable demand across China’s super first-tier to sinking markets. This real, essential consumer need forms the solid business foundation of the snack bulk model and demonstrates long-term growth potential that many industries find hard to achieve.

By the end of 2025, Mingming has established a vast network penetrating China’s urban-rural dual structure through 21,948 stores. It now covers about 75% of counties nationwide, with roughly 60% of stores rooted in counties and towns.

Deeply reaching into the sinking markets nationwide confirms the core logic of consumer industry: Where there are people, there is a demand for extreme cost-performance and joyful consumption; where there is demand, Mingming as community retail infrastructure exists.

During the scale expansion boom, Mingming achieved rapid efficiency replication through a standardized “ten-thousand stores, one model.” Looking ahead to more diverse consumer demands, the company can leverage its 432-strong digital team, using data accumulation and algorithms to evolve from standardized expansion to “ten-thousand stores, a thousand faces” refined operations.

Relying on over 200 million registered members’ massive interaction data, the digital platform can precisely insight into different regions and customer groups, providing tailored products based on taste preferences.

Imagine, in the future, stores will no longer be uniform displays but will feature differentiated product selections based on location characteristics: for example, campus stores focusing on small-packaged, low-price products and high-margin IP trendy toys; community stores adding bulk snacks and daily necessities; stores with more female consumers offering more diverse snack options, etc.

This comprehensive supply does not come at the expense of efficiency. Through AI-based product selection, intelligent replenishment, and “T+1” rapid delivery systems, Mingming is trying to ensure that even in fierce competition, each store can accurately capture personalized local consumer needs, continuously boosting store output and profitability.

04 Final Words

Industry leaders like Mingming Very Busy are valuable not only for generating hundreds of billions in revenue but also for providing countless Chinese consumers with a decision-making sense of security through digital efficiency.

And for helping people rediscover the happiness that snacks can originally bring.

This real retail revolution happening before every consumer proves that with extreme supply chain efficiency to achieve “fairness in quality and price,” retail companies gain the confidence to survive and grow.

If, on this basis of survival ability, they can further precisely capture the emotional needs of the entire population and, building on “Costco’s capacity,” achieve a leap to “Disney-like attributes,” then this business entity will break free from its original commercial constraints and cages, evolving into a new retail species with an extremely high ceiling.

Author’s statement: Personal opinions only, for reference.