Entering ChinaIn the domestic market, the snack industry has always been an imaginative track, and a number of well-known listed companies have been born. Even in the increasingly fierce competition in the industry, the snack industry still runs an industry giant with an annual revenue of 55.5 billion yuan.
This giant is that Ming Ming is very busy. It is a giant in the snack industry that was merged by the merger of Snacks and Zhao Yiming Snacks.
Recently, Mingming was very busy announcing its 2024 results, in addition to revenue of more than 55.5 billion yuan, the number of stores has grown to more than 15,000. In 2023, its revenue will exceed 20 billion yuan, that is to say, Mingming is very busy and will more than double the scale of revenue in 2024.
Looking back at the history of Mingming’s busy development, this mass-market snack giant was founded in 2017. In 7 years, from a small street shop to an industry giant, how did Ming Ming do it when he was very busy?
Two post-85s,
Selling snacks to the first place in the country
Hunan can be said to be the strongest province in China’s snack industry. It contributes one-third of the annual output value of leisure food and three-fifths of the annual output value of leisure cooked food.
Yan Zhou, born in Changsha in 1985, was first engaged in the real estate industry and did real estate marketing planning for 8 years. By chance, he found that the current snack products have great opportunities in the sinking market.
In 2017, Yan Zhou and several partners pooled more than 100,000 yuan, rented a small shop of less than 40 square meters, and started a business in the snack market, which was the predecessor of snacks being very busy. A few years later, the small shop turned out to be making huge waves in the entire snack market.
Zhao Ding was born in 1989 and is the founder of Zhao Yiming Snacks. He is a native of Wuhu, Anhui Province, but the place where he started his business is in Jiangxi. Wuhu’s fried food industry is very developed, known as the “capital of fried food”, and there are many people in Wuhu who do fried food business in other places.
Zhao Ding dropped out of high school, but he has been in contact with the roasted food business for a long time, and opened a roasted snack shop as early as 2008 and earned his first pot of gold. In 2015, Zhao Ding opened four stores in Yichun, Jiangxi Province, and the name of the store is the old Wuhu brand “Fool Melon”, which sells not only fried goods but also other snacks.
In 2019, Zhao Ding decided to make his own brand, so he named it after his son, and the first “Zhao Yiming Snacks” officially opened.
Whether it is a busy snack or Zhao Yiming’s snacks, they are all mass-selling snack stores, focusing on low prices, aiming at the snack demand of the sinking market. In the early days, Zhao Yiming’s snack positioning was to have many products, low prices, and fast updates, so that consumers could buy more categories of snack products at lower prices.
According to the statistics of CIC Consulting’s “2023 Blue Book of China’s Snack Wholesale Industry”, the price discount of brand products in mass merchandising snack stores has obvious advantages over offline supermarkets, and the discount of explosive products is equivalent to 6-8% off offline supermarkets. Zhao Yiming even took the shopping basket directly for testing, and took a basket of snacks in the store, and the price could not exceed 50 yuan.
In addition to the huge offline supermarket and convenience store system in China, and the online e-commerce snack system with convenient and fast prices and transparent prices, mass merchandiser snack stores are highly welcomed by the sinking market, and the snacks are very busy and Zhao Yiming’s snacks are developing in a low-key manner and expanding rapidly.
In April 2021, Snacks was busy getting a 240 million yuan Series A financing co-led by Sequoia China and Gaorong Capital, and the total number of stores in 2022 exceeded 2,000. In February 2023, Zhao Yiming Snacks completed Series A financing, and the number of stores exceeded 1,000 at that time.
During this period, the track of mass sales snacks exploded, and various snack wholesale brands emerged in an endless stream, such as Wanchen Group, an A-share listed company that originally did enoki mushroom business, laid out the mass sales snack track earlier, and has become one of the industry leaders so far.
At the end of 2023, the leading snacks and Zhao Yiming snacks announced their merger to form the Mingming Busy Group. This news that shook the industry also means that the wholesale snack industry has since entered the pattern of competition among leading enterprises.
In 2023, Mingming is very busy, with a sales scale (including tax) of 23.865 billion yuan and 7,000 stores. By June 2024, Mingming will be very busy and break through the scale of 10,000 stores. Subsequently, Ming Ming was very busy announcing that he would invite Jay Chou as the new spokesperson of its dual brands to further enhance the brand image and popularity.
At the recently held “2025 Mingming is busy and money-saving strategy conference”, Mingming is busy announcing that the retail sales in 2024 will exceed 55.5 billion yuan, the number of stores in operation will exceed 15,000, and the number of stores and revenue have ranked first in the national snack chain industry.
Since the establishment of Snack Busy in 2017, Ming Ming has been busy for 7 years, and has become the first in the industry from a street shop. So in the next 7 years, where will Mingming go when he is very busy?
Buying and exiting,
The big snack brand and Mingming are very busy, love and hate
Since its establishment, Mingming’s very busy development has not suffered major setbacks. But the “love-hate relationship” between it and big snack brands such as BESTORE and Yanjin Shop is very tortuous.
In February 2023, Zhao Yiming Snacks opened for financing for the first time, and BESTORE and Black Ant Capital, a well-known investment institution in the field of new consumption, jointly invested 150 million yuan, of which BESTORE invested 45 million yuan, accounting for 3% of the shares.
In a survey conducted by investment institutions in March 2023, BESTORE said that mass-selling snacks cater to consumers’ new pursuit of snack richness, price, and experience, and the company has rapidly expanded its layout through various models such as investing in Zhao Yiming’s snacks. On August 30 of that year, when asked again about the measures to deal with the development and competition of mass sales channels, BESTORE responded that one of its measures was to “actively expand the mass sales snack business through measures such as investment in snack stubbornness and Zhao Yiming snacks”.
But a month and a half later, BESTORE’s attitude suddenly “took a big turn”. On October 17, BESTORE announced the sale of its 3% stake in Zhao Yiming Snacks, with a total transaction price of about 105 million yuan. In the announcement, BESTORE said that this transaction is based on the company’s own business development needs, which is conducive to the company’s improvement of asset operation efficiency.
For BESTORE, investing in Zhao Yiming’s snacks earned about 60 million yuan, which was a very successful investment. But then things developed beyond BESTORE’s expectations. Less than a month after the two “broke up”, Zhao Yiming Snacks and Snacks were very busy announcing a strategic merger on November 10, 2023.
The merged giant undoubtedly has greater potential, and BESTORE felt cheated, and the 60 million yuan earned in his hand was instantly unfragrant, and immediately began to fight back.
Ningbo Guangyuan Juyi Investment Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of BESTORE (i.e., the entity that invested in Zhao Yiming’s snacks), believed that Zhao Yiming deliberately concealed major matters during the cooperation period between the two parties and harmed the minority shareholders’ right to know, and formally filed a lawsuit with the people’s court on November 27, 2023. BESTORE believes that it is impossible for the two leading companies involving nearly 7,000 stores to complete the merger process in just 22 days, and Zhao Yiming Snacks must have deliberately concealed the situation.
According to a relevant report by the Securities Times at the beginning of this year, BESTORE responded to the lawsuit with Zhao Yiming Snacks, saying that it “has won the lawsuit”.
It is worth noting that after the withdrawal of BESTORE and the merger of Zhao Yiming and Snack Busy, the two major snack brands of Yanjin Shop and Miss You participated in the investment in the merged snack group.
On December 18, 2023, I want you to make an announcement, announcing a total investment of 700 million yuan and getting a 6.64% stake in Snacks. Hunan Yanjin Shop Holding Co., Ltd., the controlling shareholder of Yanjin Shop, invested 350 million yuan to obtain 3.32% equity. Based on this calculation, the valuation of Mingming after the merger has exceeded 10 billion yuan.
Shiotsu Shop and Snacks are very busy, and after the merger, Mingming is very busy, and there is a long “honeymoon period”. In 2022, Snacks is busy becoming the largest customer of Yanjin Shop, contributing 211 million yuan in sales to the latter, accounting for 7.31% of Yanjin Shop’s total annual sales. In 2023, this growth grows to more than 12%.
Zhang Xuewu, the founder of Yanjin Shop, also praised the mass sale of snacks. It has publicly stated that it should actively embrace snack wholesalers (snacks are busy and Zhao Yiming) that represent the future trend.”
But the “hug” of Shiotsu shop did not last long. At the end of 2024, according to media reports, the shares of Mingming, which is very busy, held by Hunan Yanjin Shop Holdings Co., Ltd., have been transferred and withdrawn from the shareholder sequence. Due to the fact that it is a controlling shareholder, the listed company Yanjin Shop has not publicly responded to this incident.
As for the reasons for the withdrawal, one is its own business needs, and the other is directly unannounced. At present, as Mingming is busy with the increasing scale of the channel and begins to lay out its own brands, the relationship between it and the big snack brands is becoming more and more delicate.
Layout of its own brand,
Kill the neighborhood supermarket
At this strategic conference, Mingming was very busy and also released a new direction for the next stage: its own brand and community supermarket, becoming a low-cost version of “Fat Donglai”.
The layout of its own brand is the inevitable result of the expansion of the scale of mass merchandising snack stores. For a long time, the domestic snack industry has a large market space but low overall concentration, few big brands, and the market is flooded with a large number of white-label products.
As early as the beginning of the explosion of mass selling snack stores, a product model of “low-cost big brand drainage products + waist and shoulder brand + white label” was formed, in which low-cost big brand products such as Coca-Cola, Cestbon and so on were responsible for drainage, and lower-cost white-label products contributed to the main profits.
Private label is not a new concept, offline supermarkets such as Wal-Mart, Sam’s and Fat Donglai, which has exploded in recent years, are all well-known for their own brands. But in the mass snack industry, Mingming, who now has more than 15,000 stores, is very busy and is the first company to “eat crabs”.
Relying on a strong domestic industrial chain, at the press conference, Mingming was very busy announcing that its own brands cover the red label, gold label series and sub-brands to be launched in the future. Among them, the Red Label series focuses on cost performance, such as 1.9 yuan for a bottle of 600ml sugar-free oolong tea. The Gold Label series focuses on high-quality raw materials, such as 9.9 yuan 50 grams of thumb air-dried beef. The sub-brands to be launched in the future will be used to meet the needs of more refined markets.
For mass-merchandised snack stores, the launch of their own brand can strengthen profitability, but there is also direct competition with large snack brands.
After launching its own brand, Mingming is very busy, which is not only an important offline channel for big snack brands, but also a competitor for big snack brands. In this case, how to coordinate the relationship between its own brand and the big snack brand will be the key to the follow-up development of Mingming’s busy business.
In addition, starting from the snack industry to expand diversified products and enter the hard discount supermarket track, it is also one of the directions of Mingming’s busy development.
In addition to the original water drinks and snack products, the recently released Ming Ming is very busy 3.0 store, which will add diversified products such as daily chemicals, stationery, baking, eggs, etc., and add a special area for fresh food and low-temperature frozen products, moving closer to community supermarkets and convenience stores. It is understood that Mingming is very busy to launch the 3.0 store type exploration in June 2024, and the first Guangzhou test store will officially open in September.
The money-saving supermarket is a hard discount supermarket that focuses on low prices, which is an important exploration direction of the mass snack industry in recent years. In September 2024, the mass-selling snack brand “Snack Youming” announced the launch of the hard discount full-category retail brand “Snack Youming Wholesale Supermarket”, and by December, Snack Youming announced that the number of stores in this store type has exceeded 1,000. At the same time, in December last year, Wanchen Group, which is also one of the leaders in the snack industry, announced the launch of a supermarket to save money.
Judging from the development direction of Mingming is very busy and other leaders in the mass snack industry, after doing large-scale, mass snack brands are no longer satisfied with playing the role of an offline snack sales channel.
Mingming is very busy and is starting from the snack industry, developing its own brand, diversifying and expanding, trying to become a low-cost version of “Fat Donglai”. Whether this offline snack industry giant can successfully achieve its goals, Scale Business will continue to pay attention.
