Four pieces of beef jerky created a major earthquake in the snack industry.
Some time ago, Zhao Yiming, a mass-selling snack giant with 30,000 stores and a Jay Chou platform, gave consumers across the country a “measurement lesson.”
On August 10, a consumer in Cangzhou, Hebei Province picked four pieces of beef jerky at Zhao Yiming Snack Shop. The checkout showed 0.299kg and the asking price was 64.58 yuan. After returning home, I weighed it again on a fair scale and found that it was only 0.08kg, which is only 17.29 yuan. The portion was nearly four times higher, a difference of 47 yuan.
In the following half month, consumers in Henan, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Guangdong and other places reported similar experiences.
After the public opinion fermented, market supervision departments in many places came to conduct special inspections. On September 7, Zhao Yiming’s parent company, Mingming Very Busy Group, finally issued a letter of apology, promising tenfold compensation, daily scale calibration, online monitoring, and joint and several liability.
But the anger of public opinion did not subside. With the collapse of the slogan “It’s cheaper not to play tricks”, Zhao Yiming not only lost his integrity, but also the “face” of his spokesperson Jay Chou.
1. Running snack empire
Jay Chou probably didn’t expect that after more than 20 years in the Chinese music scene, he would be called “Zhao Yiming” by netizens across the country.
There is a widely circulated joke on the Internet: the father pointed to the Jay Chou poster in front of Zhao Yiming’s store and asked his son, “Who is this?” The child blurted out: “Zhao Yiming!”
Jay Chou’s national popularity was actually lost to Wandian Mentou, who was in the sinking market.
A joke is a joke. Objectively speaking, Zhao Yiming’s expansion speed is crazy in the history of Chinese retail.
This brand, which started in Yichun, Jiangxi Province in 2019, strategically merged with Changsha’s Snack Busy in 2023 to form the Mingming Busy Group, and has been on a rocket since then.
From 6,500 stores at the time of the merger, to 26,405 signed stores by the end of June 2026, the scale has reached 4 times that at the beginning of the merger. A rough estimate shows that the average number of stores added per day in the past two years is about 21.
In January this year, Mingming quickly landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and became the “first mass-selling snack stock”. The market value at the closing price on the first day was HK$85.6 billion. The 37-year-old founder Zhao Ding’s net worth exceeded HK$18 billion.
The financial report shows that the group’s revenue in 2022 was 4.286 billion yuan, which has reached 66.170 billion yuan in 2025. What supports this miracle is the two-wheel drive of the franchise model and the mentality of saving money.
2. In the name of “Jay Chou”
Jay Chou’s endorsement was once Zhao Yiming’s genius.
When the official announcement was made in July 2024, the entire snack industry was shocked. No one thought that the king who had accompanied generations of people through their youth would lower his status and give a platform to a county-level snack brand that started in Yichun, Jiangxi.
At that time, Zhao Yiming was merging with Snack Busy to form Mingming Busy Group, starting a crazy expansion of thousands of stores. They need a face that can break through all circles so that young people, middle-aged people and even adults in the county can remember the brand at a glance.
Jay Chou is the best certificate of trust.
He is a national idol spanning from the 1970s to the 2000s. He has few negative scandals and has a healthy and people-friendly image. He is highly consistent with Zhao Yiming’s positioning of being “public, economical, and reliable.”
So we saw that in just one year, Zhao Yiming’s red signboard and Jay Chou’s smiling face filled the streets of third- and fourth-tier cities and counties across the country. As of July this year, Mingming Busy Group has signed more than 30,000 stores, 60% of which are in counties and towns.
In the mass-selling snack track, there are many players, serious homogeneity, and price wars have reached the ceiling. To break through, it is necessary to build brand trust and break out of the circle of no-name snacks.
Using celebrities’ personal credibility to endorse the brand’s products can be said to be the common logic of today’s FMCG brands. Consumers’ trust in celebrities will translate into trust in brands.
After signing Jay Chou, Zhao Yiming’s store recognition immediately increased. Consumers in the sinking market are willing to believe that a brand that can afford Jay Chou will always be good.
However, celebrity endorsement is a bonus, not a free ticket. If your own products and services are bad, no matter how big a star is, they can’t save you. Instead, they will drag the star down.
In recent years, there have been many cases where celebrity endorsements have been overturned. Every time the brand apologizes, the celebrity’s reputation is left with scratches.
3. 失控的秤
Zhao Yiming’s overturn was essentially not just a problem with a scale, but a loss of control under rapid expansion.
We must first understand the nature of this business. What supports Zhao Yiming’s run of thousands of stores is the light-asset franchise model of “brand authorization + supply chain output”.
The headquarters is responsible for unifying the brand image, centralized procurement and supply, and placing national advertisements, and earns the difference in supply chain prices and franchise fees; franchisees raise their own funds to open stores, and are independently responsible for daily operations, personnel management, and terminal quality control, and earn the difference in terminal retail prices.
The financial report shows that as of the end of June 2026, Mingming Busy Group has a total of 26,405 stores nationwide, including 26,396 franchise stores, accounting for 99.97%, and only 9 self-operated stores. The group’s revenue in the first half of the year was 44.997 billion yuan, 98.99% of which came from the distribution of goods to franchisees.
Such a business structure also means that the profits of the headquarters are directly linked to the number of stores. The more stores opened, the greater the purchase volume, and the more the headquarters earns. As for whether the store makes money, it is difficult to become the core proposition of the headquarters.
The advantage of this model is rapid expansion, but the disadvantage is weak control.
Thirty thousand stores are scattered in thousands of counties, towns and towns across the country, 60% of which are located in the most basic market. The management radius of the headquarters cannot reach every store or every scale.
Nowadays, the industry continues to be low-priced, but the fundamentals of mass-selling snacks are cheap. The drinks and standard products that attract traffic are almost unprofitable. In addition, rent and labor costs are rising year by year, and there is not much room for profit margins in the supply price of the headquarters. If some franchisees want to squeeze out profits, they can only reach out to high-margin bulk products such as nuts, dried meats, and dried fruits.
4. It’s time to hit the brakes
Looking deeper, Zhao Yiming’s scale was crooked, which revealed a common problem in the entire mass-market snack industry.
In the past few years, mass-selling snacks has been one of the hottest trends in the consumer market. Capital is pouring in, and players are wildly competing for land. Everyone is competing with the speed of opening stores and the scale of financing, but they are taking the control of terminals lightly.
There are more than 30,000 stores scattered in thousands of counties across the country, and the headquarters cannot even conduct daily inspections, let alone keep an eye on every scale and every weighing.
If something goes wrong, the worst case scenario is that the headquarters will come out to apologize and pass the blame to “individual stores”; the franchisees will continue to open with a different sign, and the headquarters will recruit new franchisees to fill the gap.
In this gameplay, consumers are leeks, franchisees are tool men, and only the headquarters will always remain invincible.
Zhao Yiming was caught out this time because consumers were alert enough. But how many undiscovered tricks are hidden behind those red signs on the streets of the county?
Once it was a mistake, it happened ten times a hundred times across the country, and it became an unspoken and unspoken rule. The most ironic thing is that Zhao Yiming’s loudest slogan is “save money”, but as a result, consumers are defrauded of money based on the most basic measurement.
The trust gap in more than 30,000 stores cannot be repaired by an apology. Whether it’s tenfold compensation, calibration, or monitoring, it’s all at the technical level. What we really need to reflect on is the choice of “scale first” or “value first”, and whether to treat franchisees as money-making tools or partners.
