Extra-long egg tarts are cool: a hot-selling product that only lasted two months

Zebra Consumption Ren Jianxin

Before National Day, the “meter-level” extra-long egg tarts that became popular through short videos quickly cooled down amid the consumption boom during the National Day holiday.

From the long queues in stores and the crowds of internet celebrities checking in, to the exposure of one billion traffic on the entire network, and the receipt of tens of millions of GMV for a single brand, to the sudden drop in popularity, the internet celebrity effect of the super long egg tart lasted for less than two months.

Without exclusive technology and lack of product iteration and upgrades, the super-long egg tarts that have exploded in traffic through short videos will eventually be short-lived. This seems to be the fate of the snack track becoming an Internet celebrity.

Cool down quickly after becoming popular

During the National Day, passenger flow in business districts and pedestrian streets across the country picked up, and offline catering generally recovered, but the popularity of extra-long egg tarts declined rapidly.

And in September, extra-long egg tarts are still the undisputed top seller on the baking circuit. Short videos and Xiaohongshu store content flooded the screen, and offline stores continued to queue up, even increasing prices for purchasing and selling in limited quantities.

The ultimate visual contrast and social sharing attributes make it the fastest-growing food and beverage item in the second half of the year.

But the popularity of Internet celebrities fades faster than the explosion. In the second half of the National Day, the market trend suddenly changed. Some bakery stores in core business districts successively removed the flagship posters of extra-long egg tarts, and a large number of night market stalls and community bakeries directly removed this single product from their shelves.

In fact, the extra-long egg tart is not an original new product of a certain brand. Its popularity is an accidental hit with the help of short video traffic.

The shape of long egg tarts has actually existed for a long time. Earlier, baking brands in Guangdong and Guangxi launched 30cm “stick tarts”, which also focused on the long selling point, but were limited to the regional market.

In early August 2026, a franchise store of a chain bakery brand in Henan independently launched “extended egg tarts”. The short video shot by the store clerk unexpectedly stimulated local traffic. The number of group purchase orders exceeded 200 in a single day, and the customer flow to the store skyrocketed.

The brand headquarters quickly followed up to optimize product specifications, tart texture and supporting packaging. After completing standardization and polishing, the products were distributed and live broadcasted to attract traffic.

According to platform group buying data and industry statistics, the brand’s single product, the extra-long egg tart, had a group buying volume of more than 730,000 orders on a single platform from the trial to September 22, with GMV exceeding 13 million yuan.

As scenes of massive check-ins and queues continued to spread on social platforms, attracting store-exploring bloggers across the country to gather to build momentum, the extra-long egg tart was promoted as a national internet celebrity.

An accidental attempt by a Henan bakery store was the starting point for the traffic of extra-long egg tarts. What really makes this product popular across the country is Wuhan’s mature pre-baked supply chain.

During this period, many frozen baking factories in Wuhan quickly completed the research and development and mass production of 60 cm extra-long tart shells, and equipped them with standardized fillings, special packaging boxes and baking molds, providing one-stop wholesale supply. Whether it is chain bakery stores, street stalls, or shops in scenic spots, standardized semi-finished products can be purchased.

In just a few days, merchants across the country followed suit and launched new products. A single product that was accidentally tested quickly became a popular assembly line Internet celebrity product across the entire network. Its short life cycle was already destined.

congenital defect

The ultra-long egg tart has gone out of fashion so quickly. The fundamental reason is that there are flaws in the product attributes and business model. This is also a common problem among all short-lived Internet celebrity snacks.

The popularity of prefabricated semi-finished products has lowered the entry threshold for Internet celebrity products. Traditional egg tarts rely on the chef to manually open the pastry, prepare the egg liquid, and control the baking temperature, which requires certain skills. The prefabrication of extra-long egg tarts has achieved the “de-bakerization”.

Stores only need to purchase frozen tart shells and prepared fillings, defrost them, put them into molds, fill them with tart liquid, and bake them before serving. The extremely low operating threshold allows novice entrepreneurs and street vendors to follow up quickly.

In the entire industry chain, upstream prefabricated factories are the biggest beneficiaries. By accurately capturing the signs of platform traffic and quickly mass-producing semi-finished products, they can take advantage of the trend to reap dividends.

In September, a baking factory in Wuhan said in an interview with the media that the workshop does not stop production 24 hours a day, producing regular egg tart products within a regular eight hours, and working overtime during the rest of the time to produce extra-long egg tart shells. Orders have been scheduled until after the National Day.

Once the popularity of a single product declines, the factory will immediately implement category switching.

All business risks are always concentrated on terminal small and medium-sized merchants. A large number of store owners followed suit and initially relied on the Internet celebrity effect to maintain high customer flow and high gross profit. As similar players continue to increase, homogeneous competition directly triggers price wars. In just one month, the price of extra-long egg tarts dropped from 20 to 30 yuan to more than ten yuan.

Compared with the shortcomings of the business model, the flaws of the product itself are more fatal. The extra-long egg tart was designed for the camera from the very beginning.

With a length of 60 centimeters and a brushed visual effect, the picture has a strong impact. However, in order to support the extra-long shape and prevent baking deformation, the thickness of the tart shell is much higher than that of ordinary egg tarts, and the finished product tastes hard and dry.

The long and narrow structure also caused an imbalance in the distribution of fillings. The tart shells at both ends were thick and dry, with almost no fillings. The fillings were accumulated in the middle, and the overall taste was skewed. At the same time, the extra-long size has extremely poor practicality. It is easy to lose residue, collapse the skin, and leak fillings when eating. The consumer experience is generally poor.

One-time punch-in consumption makes it difficult to repurchase this single product. After the novelty wears off, obsolescence becomes inevitable.

Compression of the life cycle of internet celebrity items

In the era of short videos, the life cycle of Internet celebrity snacks has been extremely compressed. From the smoking ice cream and towel rolls in the early years, to the extra-long French fries and bursting durian cakes in the past two years, and now to the extra-long egg tarts, the survival time of Internet celebrity items has been shortened from half a year to one or two months.

The rapid rise and fall of the extra-long egg tarts is a true microcosm of the entire Internet celebrity snack track. The current snack market is breaking away from the traditional logic of “taste is king” and gradually falling into the strange circle of traffic thinking.

The maturity of the prefabricated supply chain has infinitely lowered the threshold for new product innovation. As long as there is a trace of traffic on the platform, the upstream factories can quickly complete research and development and mass production. As a result, all Internet celebrity items will eventually follow the trend, price involution, and rapid elimination.

Today’s Internet celebrity snacks do not reflect innovation, but have become traffic props for mass production on the assembly line. Blindly chasing algorithm preferences and relying on visual gimmicks to gain traffic, instead ignore the most fundamental taste, experience and reputation.

In this era of internet celebrities emerging one after another, consumers have become more mature. Young users no longer blindly pay for marketing hype and Internet celebrity premiums, causing the Internet celebrity effect to come and go faster.

The quick cooling of the extra-long egg tarts has sounded the alarm for the internet celebrity consumption circuit. A short video can instantly make a product popular, but it cannot create sustained consumer demand; the supply chain can produce hot hits in batches, but it cannot create long-term vitality of the product.

The current industry situation of online celebrity products being updated once a month means that the dividends from traffic speculation have peaked.