---
title: "Benchmarking Hema Fresh? What is the 'Super Species' that Capital Today's Kathy Xu has her eye on?"
description: "Why did Capital Today, the earliest investor in JD.com, set its sights on Yonghui's newly created 'Super Species'? How is it different from Alibaba's Hema Fresh? Here's everything you need to know. At the start of the new year, an event almost overlooked by e-commerce and traditional retail insiders: Capital Today invested in Yonghui's little-known subsidiary, Yonghui Cloud创. According to Yonghui's latest announcement, it plans to jointly increase capital in Yonghui Cloud创 by 460 million yuan with Capital Today. After the increase, Yonghui Cloud创's registered capital will reach 1 billion yuan, with Yonghui Supermarket holding 52% and Capital Today holding 12%."
author: "戏哥"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2017-01-08"
language: "en"
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# Benchmarking Hema Fresh? What is the 'Super Species' that Capital Today's Kathy Xu has her eye on?

> Why did Capital Today, the earliest investor in JD.com, set its sights on Yonghui's newly created 'Super Species'? How is it different from Alibaba's Hema Fresh? Here's everything you need to know. At the start of the new year, an event almost overlooked by e-commerce and traditional retail insiders: Capital Today invested in Yonghui's little-known subsidiary, Yonghui Cloud创. According to Yonghui's latest announcement, it plans to jointly increase capital in Yonghui Cloud创 by 460 million yuan with Capital Today. After the increase, Yonghui Cloud创's registered capital will reach 1 billion yuan, with Yonghui Supermarket holding 52% and Capital Today holding 12%.

Why did Capital Today's Kathy Xu, the earliest investor in JD.com, set her sights on Yonghui's newly created 'Super Species'? How is it different from Alibaba's Hema Fresh? Here's everything you need to know.
At the start of the new year, an event almost overlooked by e-commerce and traditional retail insiders: Capital Today, the earliest investor in JD.com, invested in Yonghui's little-known subsidiary, Yonghui Cloud创. According to Yonghui's latest announcement, it plans to jointly increase capital in Yonghui Cloud创 by 460 million yuan with Capital Today. After the increase, Yonghui Cloud创's registered capital will reach 1 billion yuan, with Yonghui Supermarket holding 52% and Capital Today holding 12%.
The announcement also stated that Capital Today, as a leading investment firm in technology, internet, and retail consumption, participating in this capital increase is not only recognition of Yonghui Cloud创's new model of integrated online-offline development, but will also play an important role in boosting the incubation and innovation of new business formats for Yonghui Cloud创.
But what exactly is Yonghui Cloud创's new model of integrated online-offline development? Some industry insiders speculate that Yonghui Supermarket and its shareholder JD.com are jointly developing a new product to benchmark against Alibaba's 'Hema Fresh'. However, since JD.com did not participate in the investment in Yonghui Cloud创, it remains speculation.
However, the observant Xi Ge found clues. On January 1st this year, Yonghui's new business format 'Super Species' successfully opened in its home base Fuzhou, marking the fifth format after Red Label stores, Green Label stores, Precision Label stores, and Membership stores. Yonghui calls this new format 'Member E-commerce Super Species Experience Store', and its operating entity is Yonghui Cloud创 Commercial Management Co., Ltd. Perhaps this 'Super Species' is the secret product that Capital Today's Kathy Xu has her eye on to benchmark against 'Hema Fresh'?
**What exactly is Yonghui's envisioned 'Super Species'?**
According to Xi Ge, this 'Super Species' Yonghui Member E-commerce Super Species Experience Store is located on the northeast side of Fuzhou Square in Gulou District, in the CBD area of Wusi Road, the most central and bustling business district in Fuzhou. Its operating area is only 500 square meters, and as a combination of multiple restaurants, it offers fresh, safe, and cost-effective high-quality global ingredients. It integrates eight innovative projects currently incubated by Yonghui: Salmon Workshop, Lobster Workshop, Box Beef Workshop, Wheat Workshop, Yongyuehui, Living Kitchen, Healthy Living Organic Pavilion, and Jinghou Huakai Flower Art Pavilion.
With the official launch of 'Super Species', the food ingredient experience dining incubation projects that were 'hidden' within Yonghui have been completed. Besides the newly unveiled 'Lobster Workshop' in 'Super Species', the three major modules of Yonghui's food ingredient experience projects—'Wheat Workshop', 'Salmon Workshop', and 'Box Beef Workshop'—had all opened last year.
The Yongyuehui, Living Kitchen, Healthy Living Organic Pavilion, and Jinghou Huakai Flower Art Pavilion in Super Species are Yonghui's use of global supply chain resources to display and sell products closely related to consumers' lives, such as wine, cooking ingredients, organic products, and flowers, in a category-focused and artistic display. The entire store has around 1,000 SKUs, and consumers can choose any payment method at checkout.
**Is the 'Supermarket + Restaurant' cross-industry mix a customer magnet?**
Why is it named 'Super Species'? A Yonghui spokesperson explained: Super Species is the future supermarket + dining, allowing consumers to better experience future life through food.
Among these, the many dining projects focused on ingredient experience are particularly noteworthy.
Take the earliest and most mature 'Salmon Workshop' model as an example.
The menu is very simple, focusing naturally on the salmon series—from soups, sushi, sashimi to hot pot—this fish contributes nearly 70% of the store's revenue. In addition, it offers a few selected ingredients such as Antarctic scampi, beef, red clams, and Arctic clams, and a teppanyaki area specially set up to address the seasonality of Japanese cuisine and local tastes. A meal here can be had for under 200 yuan, and with a focus on fresh and healthy, it hits the consumption habits of urban middle class.
A supermarket opening its own restaurant naturally relies on the supermarket's own supply chain and logistics system. The salmon sold here comes from the Atlantic (not limited to the UK, Denmark, or Norway), red shrimp from Argentina, beef from Australia, and Arctic clams and red clams are provided locally, so they can be kept fresh. New varieties can be directly initiated by the restaurant, with the supermarket negotiating purchases and listing them in other Bravo branches, a scale advantage many single stores cannot achieve.
But opening restaurants in supermarkets has significant constraints. First, not all supermarket spaces have licenses for food service, especially for Japanese restaurants with higher hygiene requirements, so Yonghui, after testing in Bravo supermarket stores, still needs to launch mixed formats like 'Super Species'. At the same time, the kitchen of Salmon Workshop is separate from the supermarket's central kitchen for deli items, and with hired service staff, it constitutes a sizable team. The supermarket it is in, however, pursues continuously reducing labor costs and increasing efficiency per square meter. Theoretically, running a restaurant and running a supermarket are two completely different directions.
It can be said that Salmon Workshop 'looks like a standard Japanese restaurant' but is not a 'standard Japanese restaurant'. Its current positioning is ingredient sales + dining experience, and in the future, it hopes to become an ingredient experience center that cultivates new markets and new consumption habits. Running a restaurant is just one effective channel it has found to attract consumers and increase brand awareness, but the most important purpose is to let consumers experience why these ingredients are good and how to consume (eat) them in the best way.
The Japanese restaurant focusing on salmon is just one category in Yonghui's global quality ingredient supply chain. With Salmon Workshop as a start, Yonghui has begun incubating more independent dining brands.
In November last year, Wheat Workshop, focusing on bakery experience, opened in several Bravo stores in Fuzhou. On December 9th, Yonghui's mid-to-high-end product store Bravo YH opened at Nanjing Bravo YH Maoye store, and launched another self-operated dining brand 'Box Beef Workshop'.
Similar to Salmon Workshop, Box Beef Workshop relies on Yonghui's global supply chain resources to operate imported beef. Due to huge procurement volumes and eliminating intermediate links, Box Beef Workshop can control the retail price of an imported Angus steak between 30-50 yuan. Compared to restaurants where a steak often costs over a hundred yuan, this price is very competitive.
The 'Workshop' series shares the supply chain with Yonghui Supermarket and expands through its store network. However, from its 'internal partner' system and relatively independent operating mechanism from Yonghui Supermarket, it is clear that Yonghui's attempt to integrate retail and dining is not limited to driving mutual customer traffic, but aims to incubate independent dining brands as a major profit point for Yonghui Supermarket in the future.
**Key to experiential consumption innovation:**
**Capturing consumer minds through life scenario experiences**
Facing ambitious fresh e-commerce competitors vying for market share, physical supermarkets ultimately choose the dining format as a magic weapon to boost performance.
For example, in formats like 'Super Species', restaurants can increase the frequency of customer visits and dwell time in the supermarket. The high gross margin of the dining industry can directly increase sales and even improve the profit structure of offline stores. Yonghui has a complete supply chain system and can achieve scale advantages, so whether operating restaurants in premium supermarkets or 'Super Species', profits can be considerable.
But not all offline stores can achieve this; high-quality supply chains, Yonghui's brand effect, and the huge operating costs of self-built central kitchens are all limiting factors. However, taking the experience to the extreme, making people slow down and become more sticky, is a common customer magnet for offline physical formats.
As the hypothetical rival to Yonghui's 'Super Species', Alibaba's Hema Fresh also uses a model of supermarket retail + dining consumption + fresh food processing + extreme delivery to meet consumers' daily needs for 'food' and create a brand-new eating and living experience.
So, how do both Super Species and Hema Fresh build their competitive advantages?
First is the premiumization of consumption space. Super Species' first store is in Fuzhou's CBD business district, while Hema Fresh stores are basically located in shopping malls, ensuring foot traffic and target customer positioning, while defining their image and grade—popular but not low-end. Let users recognize this as a place that provides safe, reliable, curated products and a cost-effective consumption experience.
Second is creating a cross-category experience from a consumption scenario. From purchasing fresh food to buying prepared food to directly dining and experiencing ingredients and other goods and services, they combine a complete set of scenario-based consumption experiences around 'eating'.
Finally, it's not just about in-store consumption; they also offer fresh food processing and delivery to home, pursuing an upgraded experience in delivery efficiency.
In a word, this new type of large retail format is about providing solutions for people's food and beverage services. In this process, it is not only a new product combination and service innovation driven by offline stores, but also requires e-commerce layout and services to complete the closed loop of experience. More importantly, the combination of new offline retail formats and e-commerce can achieve the digitalization of member and product data, and from a large retail perspective, can also achieve the integration of store, warehouse, and data, building a real-time feedback consumer system.
It can be said that Super Species is somewhat similar in form to Hema Fresh, but in Xi Ge's view, Super Species has better offline experience, stronger dining formats, and more advantages in fresh supply chain, while Hema Fresh excels in online efficiency and offline layout. However, will 'Super Species', favored by the iron lady of Capital Today, leverage the dual advantages of JD.com and Yonghui to create ultimate e-commerce efficiency? We'll wait and see.
**This article is from WeChat public account Diaoxi E-commerce (ID: tiaoxiEC), reprinted with authorization.**
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