Source | Lingshou Hua Weimanlou In recent years, the hottest term in the supermarket industry has been "renovation." But today, renovation is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution—it's not just about changing shelves, updating light boxes, or rearranging SKUs. True renovation is not surface-level work; it's a business restructuring and a format reshaping.
The retail industry has bid farewell to the "scale is king" expansion mindset and entered a new cycle centered on "model self-consistency" and "profit loop closure." All supermarket renovations must deliver results from a profitable system.
Lecheng Supermarket started from a hypermarket and attempted to "de-hypermarketize"; Chaoshifa, rooted in communities, refined "sticky scenarios"; while Qihuojie broke out from snack bulk retail and transformed into a "family food premium collection."
Their renovation paths differ, but they all point to one fact: renovation is not performance, but a new concept and direction that suits themselves and the market.
Lecheng: From Hypermarket to Fresh Legend and Le Dazui Superstores
Recently, the flagship store of Lecheng Supermarket on Jinzhai Road, Shushan District, Hefei, completed its renovation. According to Wang Wei, founder of Lecheng Supermarket and chairman of Fresh Legend, the third floor was transformed into a Fresh Legend Living Hall, and the fourth floor into a Le Dazui Food Hall, "colloquially called Fresh Legend Superstore and Le Dazui Superstore."
The Fresh Legend Superstore is not a simple expansion of area but a deep practice of restructuring the supermarket format with the mindset of a "professional food hall." Its core lies in creating a "fresh food museum" that integrates shopping, experience, and education through extreme scenario-based, differentiated, and fresh-food management.
I. Strategic Positioning: Beyond a Supermarket, a "Food Living Hall."
The store's positioning has surpassed traditional fresh supermarkets, upgrading to a "food living hall." Its core is to build a complete ecosystem around "eating," transforming the store into a collection of professional food workshops, providing consumers with a full-chain, high-experience food solution from raw materials to finished products.
II. Format Logic: Innovating All Categories with Fresh Food Management Thinking.
Scenario-based market design: Adopting a "no main aisle" market concept, breaking traditional shelf layouts, and creating an immersive shopping experience. Consumers feel like they are strolling through different themed food workshops.
This is a category crossover and reconstruction:
The third floor is the Fresh Legend Living Hall, a "fresh food" scenario: focusing on deep differentiation. By cultivating "tender greens" (only taking seedlings), creating "China's Good Mushrooms" (60+ SKUs), and "Tomato Collection" (30+ SKUs) and other super categories, it builds a product barrier that is hard to replicate.
The fourth floor is the Le Dazui Food Hall, a "new snack" scenario: pioneering the concept of "snacks freshly cooked, freshness extended," using five themed islands (snack island, nut island, light meal island, dessert island, and fried food island) to completely innovate the snack experience. Through on-site roasting and cooking, it successfully replicates the "freshness" management logic of fresh food into the snack category, creating an industry-leading core competitiveness.
III. Business Strategy: Deep SKU Cultivation and Technology-Driven Lean Operations.
Extreme single-product strategy: Not pursuing breadth, but depth and uniqueness. For example, the "Goodbye Knife" project persisted for nearly 10 years before becoming profitable, reflecting a long-term commitment to product development.
Technology-enabled loss control: Introducing time-based automatic discount technology, with prices automatically linked to the POS system, achieving precise inventory management and loss control, ensuring a balance between product freshness and profit.
Scenario-based display: Setting up "tofu room," "egg area with live chicken display," etc., using props and environment to "stage" the processing process, greatly enhancing product credibility and purchase desire.
The success of the Fresh Legend Superstore stems from founder Wang Wei's systematic creation based on global vision and long-term accumulation. It proves that the future of physical retail lies in transforming from a "sales place" to a "professional content venue," regaining market discourse power by creating deep experiences, exclusive products, and on-site atmosphere that cannot be easily replaced by e-commerce. This is not just a store upgrade but an industry-level format innovation demonstration.
Chaoshifa: The Fifth Renovation of Shuangyushu Store A War to Win Back Hearts
Compared to Lecheng's bold moves, Chaoshifa's renovation is more like "acupuncture-style restructuring," reshaping the "people, goods, and place" of community commerce.
This veteran supermarket deeply rooted in Beijing completed the fifth renovation of its Shuangyushu store in 2025. It's more of a strategic upgrade from a traditional supermarket to a "community life proposal center" than a mere renovation. Its core lies in systematically restructuring around "people, goods, and place," activating community commerce with warmth and experience.
I. Positioning Reconstruction: From Selling Goods to Proposing Lifestyles.
The fundamental shift of this renovation is redefining itself from a "transaction place" to a "life proposal center." It no longer just provides daily necessities but offers one-stop dietary and life solutions for community residents of all ages, centered on modern life needs such as "freshness, liveliness, health, and emotion."
II. Product Strategy: Equal Emphasis on Selection and Experience, Blending Tradition and Trends.
Strengthening the fresh food core: The aquatic area has been significantly expanded in size and categories, meat has added fresh cuts and meal sets, and vegetables have increased organic proportion, building a "freshness" barrier.
Enhancing on-site experience: Through open-kitchen fresh preparation (fried goods, roast meats, roast duck), introducing time-honored brand joint operations (Fengzeyuan, Liubiju), and on-site processing (tofu, sashimi), turning "livelihood atmosphere" into core competitiveness, with new products made on-site accounting for 40% of new products.
Precise product replacement: SKUs streamlined to 6,900, but the product replacement rate is as high as 48%. On one hand, introducing imported ingredients, light meals, and low-GI foods to attract young people; on the other hand, retaining old flavors to achieve symbiosis between tradition and trends.
III. Scenario Recreation: Creating Community Warmth with Details.
The upgrade is a "scenario revolution," creating a sense of community belonging through sensory experiences. Transparent fish tanks, the aroma of bread and coffee, Japanese-style light meals and Beijing-style snacks displayed together, all build a vibrant and warm social space. The newly added eight themed areas (such as pet paradise and autumn cup display) further meet consumers' emotional and interest needs.
IV. Role Elevation: Becoming a Community Emotional Hub.
Ultimately, Chaoshifa aims to become the community's "emotional hub." It activates the "morning economy" by introducing brands like Luckin Coffee, and through shared space design, allows the elderly to find memories and the young to discover freshness, promoting intergenerational integration and community interaction.
The success of this renovation lies in transcending pure commodity transactions. Through precise product assortment, immersive scenario experiences, and humanized services, it rekindles the community's liveliness, providing an excellent model for physical retail to respond to online impact and deepen community value.
Chaoshifa's renovation tells us that the end of retail is not scale or traffic, but how to rekindle the community's liveliness. The advantage of community supermarkets has never been SKUs, but the ability to be trusted and remembered.
The meaning of renovation is not to become more modern, but to be more like a good neighbor.
Qihuojie: Bidding Farewell to "Price Wars," Moving Toward "Family Life Premium Collection"
Snack collection stores experienced explosive growth from 2021 to 2023, but also quickly entered a reshuffling period.
Qihuojie is a brand that chose to "renovate without following the trend" in this round of elimination.
Unlike many peers who use low prices as a competitive weapon, Qihuojie began proposing the strategy of "family life snack premium collection" from mid-2023, abandoning the big and comprehensive approach and turning to the refined and specialized.
They made a risky decision:
SKUs cut to no more than 600;
Products centered on "family main consumers," downplaying student-oriented and casual small-pack products;
Setting up 3 main traffic zones: "Family Sharing Pack Zone," "Parent-Child Scenario Zone," and "Cooked Food & Ready-to-Eat & Beverage Integrated Zone";
Using high-frequency repurchase products as traffic entrances and mid-priced, high-margin family snacks as profit support.
More importantly, they broke the "pure snack" positioning and began experimenting with "meal + food" linkage. In a Nanjing store, a "snacks + light meal" integrated model has been launched, offering on-site edible products such as braised rice bowls, instant rice noodles, and fresh-cut fruit drinks.
The founder of Qihuojie said at an internal meeting: "We are not a 'snack store,' but a 'family light meal solution.'"
In July 2025, Qihuojie launched a new-generation store, with an area of over 200 square meters, achieving first-day sales exceeding 500,000 yuan.
Through the creation of new-generation stores, Qihuojie successfully practiced a differentiated breakthrough path centered on "quality-price ratio." The core of its renovation is to upgrade from a snack store to a "community quality life center" covering high-frequency daily needs of families.
Qihuojie proactively jumped out of homogeneous competition and carried out strategic category restructuring. Its core measure is to gradually reduce the snack proportion from 100% in the past to 70%, and plan to reduce it to 60%, while significantly introducing categories such as fruits, cooked foods, freshly baked goods, rice, flour, oil, seasonings, and health foods. This means it no longer just meets consumers' snack needs but aims to provide almost all daily foods except fresh meat and vegetables, transforming into a "one-stop family food shopping station."
In addition, Qihuojie adheres to the quality-price ratio code of "quality at low prices." Consumers pursue "reassuring quality" and "comfortable experience," not absolute low prices. By providing high-quality, high-experience products and services, Qihuojie builds solid customer loyalty, allowing it to maintain old store growth and stable profitability even in the harsh environment of long-term low-price promotions by competitors.
Currently, Qihuojie stores average monthly sales per square meter between 1,800 and 2,200 yuan, with some excellent stores exceeding 3,000 yuan. Cooked food and family-pack products have become the core of gross profit, and price wars are no longer the primary strategy.
Through renovation, they have completed a qualitative change from "high turnover density" to "structural closure."
Different Renovations: Efficiency and Restructuring
Lecheng, Chaoshifa, and Qihuojie, seemingly three brands with different styles, collectively answer an old industry question with renovation:
"Renovation" is not renewal; it's turning a new page.
True renovation is an "internal core transformation" around business models, customer structure, product flow, service touchpoints, and profit pool structure.
The end of renovation is efficiency; and the essence of efficiency is restructuring.