---
title: "Hunan People Are About to 'Monopolize' China's Snack Industry"
description: "In just a few years, snack stores have sprung up across China. Brands like Snacks Busy, Zhao Yiming, and Good Want are expanding against the odds despite pressure on brick-and-mortar retail. Behind this boom, Hunan people are busy: five of the top ten bulk snack brands in China were founded by Hunan natives, and Hunan contributes one-third of the nation's leisure food output and three-fifths of its cooked leisure food."
author: "华商韬略"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2024-12-20"
language: "en"
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# Hunan People Are About to 'Monopolize' China's Snack Industry

> In just a few years, snack stores have sprung up across China. Brands like Snacks Busy, Zhao Yiming, and Good Want are expanding against the odds despite pressure on brick-and-mortar retail. Behind this boom, Hunan people are busy: five of the top ten bulk snack brands in China were founded by Hunan natives, and Hunan contributes one-third of the nation's leisure food output and three-fifths of its cooked leisure food.

In just a few years, snack stores have sprung up across China. Brands like Snacks Busy, Zhao Yiming, and Good Want are expanding against the odds despite pressure on brick-and-mortar retail. Especially in third- and fourth-tier cities, you can spot one every few hundred meters. Such dense store placement is only comparable to the pharmacy chains that line streets and alleys. Behind the snack store boom, Hunan people are busy. Five of the top ten bulk snack brands in China were founded by Hunan natives. The owners of leading companies such as Snacks Busy, Snacks Youming, Dai Yonghong, Love Snacks, and Snacks Youxuan are all authentic Hunan people. Not only snack stores, but national-level snacks like latiao (spicy strips), duck neck, mojiao (konjac) snacks, and dried small fish were also invented by Hunan people. Want Want Group, Juewei Duck Neck, Weilong Food, Mala Prince, Yanjin Shop... countless snack giants were either founded by Hunan people or have their companies based in Hunan. Hunan alone contributes one-third of the nation's leisure food annual output value and three-fifths of its cooked leisure food output. The first self-manufactured leisure snack stock in China was born in Hunan, and Hunan is also the province with the most snack companies. Why can Hunan dominate the snack industry?
**Rise by the Xiang River** In 1992, Cai Yanming, chairman of Taiwan's leading leisure food company Want Want Group, came to mainland China to invest. Upon hearing this news, coastal provinces quickly extended olive branches: Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangsu all said, "We'll give you policies and land." But surprisingly, Cai Yanming refused them all, saying, "I want to build the factory in Hunan." Hearing this, the Taiwanese business circle thought he was "crazy." At that time, Hunan was still an underdeveloped region with no expressways, and few Taiwanese businessmen were willing to invest there. Cai Yanming's decision was not impulsive; he had insight into Hunan's unique advantages in the food industry. **First, raw materials.** At that time, Hunan's annual grain output ranked among the top five in the country, and its annual rice output ranked first among all provinces. The core ingredient for Want Want's signature rice crackers is rice, so being close to the source was a natural advantage. **Second, labor costs in Hunan were lower than in coastal areas.** The average monthly wage in Changsha was 229 yuan, while in Guangzhou it was 335.58 yuan. Additionally, the Hunan local government placed special importance on Want Want, building roads and power plants as needed, showing even more sincerity than the coastal provinces. Cai Yanming said, "As soon as I heard that there was a Wangcheng County in Changsha, Hunan, I thought of 'wangcai' (prosperity), and it felt great. I believe in fate and luck." In 1992, Want Want's factory was established in Wangcheng County. With CCTV ads shouting "You prosper, I prosper, everyone prospers!" and "Li Ziming from Class 6, Grade 3, your mother brought you two cans of Want Want milk," Want Want indeed grew more prosperous, and Hunan's snack industry embarked on its rise. Today, Want Want's annual revenue reaches 23.586 billion yuan, with net profit of 3.99 billion yuan, surpassing the combined profits of Master Kong and Uni-President. It is the undisputed profit king of Chinese snacks. Hunan did not disappoint Cai Yanming. Regarding this fate, Cai Yanming once said emotionally, "Taiwan is my hometown that raised me, but Hunan is my career hometown!" Want Want's success in Hunan proved that the land along the Xiang River naturally has the genes of food culture, and with the injection of commercial civilization, excellent food enterprises can be born. In 1998, floods hit the Yangtze River basin, severely affecting Pingjiang County in Hunan, causing a reduction in dried tofu production. The local sauce-dried tofu workshops, which were the livelihood of the people, were forced to shut down, and villagers worried about making a living. By chance, sauce-dried tofu masters Qiu Pingjiang, Li Mengneng, and Zhong Qingyuan tried using flour instead of soybean powder to make strips, then coated them with chili seasoning. The result was unexpectedly delicious, and latiao was invented. Latiao was an instant hit. Soon, the news spread among relatives and friends. Witnessing success firsthand is the most vivid, and the demonstration effect of those around you is the most compelling. In China's unique clan society, people help and learn from each other, and through "mentoring and leading," the small sauce-dried tofu workshops in Pingjiang County were transformed into latiao production lines. Years later, Zhang Yudong, founder of Mala Prince, recalled excitedly, "At that time, we were making money automatically with our eyes closed; the market was in short supply, and production capacity couldn't keep up with demand." At that time, every household in Pingjiang County was busy, and latiao was shipped out by the truckload. No one could have imagined that this small snack would now sell in 160 countries worldwide, with an annual output value exceeding 60 billion yuan, larger than China's box office market. Pingjiang County has also become prosperous thanks to latiao. Currently, there are over 300 spicy snack enterprises in the county, contributing one-third of the nation's latiao production capacity and driving employment for 200,000 people upstream and downstream. According to relevant data, 9 out of 10 well-known latiao companies in China were founded by Pingjiang natives, including Liu Weiping of Weilong Food, Zhang Yudong of Mala Prince, and Zhou Jinsong of Jinzai Food. In 2022, local enterprises even promised to give the three latiao inventors retirement benefits equivalent to retired cadres, thanking them for their flash of inspiration that gave birth to a 60-billion-yuan industry and changed the fate of hundreds of thousands of people. **The success of latiao proved that traditional Hunan snacks combined with modern business operations can create miracles.** By extension, Hunan has countless snacks—could there be a "second latiao"?
**One After Another** In 2005, Dai Wenjun, who was working as a marketing manager at Zhuzhou Qianjin Pharmaceutical, hit a career bottleneck and decided to leave and start his own business. Having lived in Hunan for many years and loving food, he set his sights on duck neck. Duck neck originated in the Dongting Lake area of Changde and Yueyang, Hunan, during the Qing Dynasty, and later spread to Hubei, Jiangxi, and Sichuan. At that time, the duck neck market was still in the early commercial stage dominated by mom-and-pop shops. Although Wuhan Zhou Hei Ya and Jiangxi Huang Shang Huang were already somewhat famous, they were limited to their local areas. Years of business experience made Dai Wenjun realize that although duck neck was small, the market was huge. So he chose to focus on braised snacks centered on duck neck and founded Juewei Duck Neck. Before opening, Dai Wenjun met with several partners and boldly declared, "In the next three years, we will achieve an annual revenue of over 100 million yuan!" The partners laughed after hearing this, thinking it was a pipe dream for such a small snack. But Dai Wenjun secretly calculated that duck neck couldn't grow because it lacked modern production processes and store expansion models. If he combined professional factories with franchise chains, it was possible to achieve annual revenue of over 100 million. He wanted to "gamble." Also wanting to "gamble" was Zhang Xuewu from Liuyang, Hunan. Also in 2005, a frustrated Zhang Xuewu returned from Shenzhen to his hometown in Liuyang and took over his father's preserved fruit workshop. Facing the crude production line, he fell into thought: Why could America's Lay's become so big, while Hunan snacks could only stay in a corner? With determination, Zhang Xuewu founded Yanjin Shop, upgrading preserved fruit to modern packaged snacks and expanding beyond preserved fruit to develop nuts, soy products, meat products, and other categories. At that time, **snack companies all shipped through distributors, but Zhang Xuewu believed that distributors monopolized channels and added layers of markup, leaving him without bargaining power and making it hard to grow.** After research, he found that international brands like Orion, Dove, and Lay's cooperated with supermarkets, reducing middlemen and allowing them to better sense consumer needs. So Zhang Xuewu resolutely decided to focus on supermarkets, establishing partnerships with Walmart, Carrefour, and RT-Mart. Competitors were puzzled by this strategy, thinking it was easier to hand products directly to distributors. They considered Zhang Xuewu a "reckless fool." In February 2017, Yanjin Shop was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, becoming the first self-manufactured leisure snack stock. Today, its annual revenue is 4.115 billion yuan, with a market value of 14.1 billion yuan. A month later, Juewei Duck Neck was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, becoming the king of braised snacks. Its annual revenue now reaches 7.261 billion yuan, with a market value of 12.3 billion yuan, surpassing the combined total of Huang Shang Huang and Zhou Hei Ya. Facts proved that Dai Wenjun was not "dreaming," and Zhang Xuewu was not a "reckless fool." Both entrepreneurs started their ventures in the same year, listed their companies in the same year, both chose to use modern business methods to transform traditional Hunan snacks, and both achieved leaps through the capital market. The difference is that Dai Wenjun chose to focus on braised snacks, while Zhang Xuewu chose multi-category snacks. Their business philosophies differed, but both succeeded. The potential of Hunan's snack industry is enormous, providing space and practical soil for different types of entrepreneurs, and the success of predecessors has inspired a new generation of entrepreneurs to seek fortune. In the year Yanjin Shop and Juewei Duck Neck were listed, Yan Zhou, a post-85s native of Miluo, Hunan, left the real estate industry and prepared to start a business. At that time, in Hunan's entrepreneurial circle, many people were engaged in the snack industry, and many thought of snacks when considering entrepreneurship, which prompted Yan Zhou to focus on this industry. After more than 20 years of accumulation, Hunan's snack industry supply chain has become very complete. Changsha's Gaoqiao Market has become one of the largest snack distribution centers in the country, gathering over 2,100 beverage and food trading companies with annual sales of 55 billion yuan. Snack products were already saturated, and Yan Zhou realized that the blue ocean was not in snacks themselves but in terminal retail channels. In 2017, listening to Jay Chou's "Cowboy Is Busy," Yan Zhou named his company Snacks Busy, focusing on the bulk snack model. Compared with traditional snack stores, bulk snack stores create an "anchoring effect" by discounting well-known brand snacks, creating an impression of cheapness and value, then increase profit margins through bulk white-label snacks, while attracting franchisees with low entry barriers. This model, supported by a strong upstream supply chain, proved very effective, and franchisees flocked in, allowing rapid store expansion. The increasing number of stores enabled Snacks Busy to negotiate better prices with upstream suppliers, further increasing discount space and forming a growth flywheel. In April 2021, Snacks Busy completed a 240 million yuan Series A financing round, led by Sequoia Capital China and Gaorong Capital. Sequoia's investment logic was simple: whoever becomes the number one in Hunan has the potential to become the number one nationally. With capital backing, Snacks Busy accelerated its expansion, adding an average of 1,000 stores every six months. At the end of 2023, it merged with Zhao Yiming Snacks to form Mingming Henmang Group. Currently, the two brands have a combined total of over 10,000 stores, making them the industry leader. The group also specially invited Jay Chou as its spokesperson. Looking back, the rapid expansion of bulk snack stores ultimately relies on the very complete snack supply chain led by Hunan. Everything was ready; all that was needed was the east wind. Whether this model can last and whether rapid expansion carries risks remains to be seen, but it is certain that innovation in Hunan's snack industry will continue.
**Why Hunan?** Following the growth trajectories of these entrepreneurs, we can discern a clear thread. Hunan's dominance in the snack industry is essentially a phenomenon of a "local industrial belt." First, Hunan's strong agricultural foundation solves the problem of raw materials for snacks and also gave rise to a rich snack culture. Hunan people love to taste food and eat snacks. Some joke that Hunan people even use snacks in cooking, which is the major premise for the rise of the snack industrial belt. Under this premise, once a pioneer discovers a business opportunity and tastes success, it acts like a spark, and under the influence of China's clan culture, it forms "mentoring and leading," becoming an industrial dividend for a village, town, or county. The rise of latiao is a typical example. Subsequently, with the efforts of the government and enterprises, professional production lines took shape, transitioning from small workshops to professionalization, and products began to go nationwide. The success of one hit product encourages more entrepreneurs to explore business opportunities in other snacks. For example, Juewei Duck Neck, Yanjin Preserved Fruit, Jinzai Small Fish, and Black Classic Stinky Tofu all use modern business methods to transform traditional snacks. As product lines increase, wholesale, warehousing, and logistics cluster together, forming an industrial cluster. Gaoqiao Market developed and grew in this context. Over time, a unique entrepreneurial culture forms locally, and new generations of entrepreneurs immersed in this atmosphere stand on the shoulders of their predecessors, driving industrial evolution. Bulk snack stores were born from this logic. Of course, behind the industry, there is a key point that cannot be ignored—people. Looking at the growth history of Hunan's snack industrial belt, products change, models change, but the only constant is the spiritual essence of Hunan people: fearless, patient, hardworking, and tenacious. They can break the old and establish the new in times of crisis, and share dividends when business opportunities arise. **People are the most important factor.** Across the vast land of China, similar scripts are constantly unfolding. The wig industry in Xuchang, Henan; the express delivery industry in Tonglu, Zhejiang; the swimwear industry in Xingcheng, Liaoning; the Hanfu industry in Cao County, Shandong; the furniture industry in Foshan, Guangdong; the laptop industry in Kunshan, Jiangsu... Local traditional culture merges with modern commercial civilization, and through the struggles of generations seeking to change their destiny, unique commercial wonders are born. This is also the resilience and strength of China's economy that keeps it thriving.


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