Haolaiwu Comes to Town: What Can Mom-and-Pop Shops Still Sell?

A township mom-and-pop store's shelves used to be determined jointly by the owner's experience, the distributor's order list, and the tastes of regular customers. Which spicy strips sold fast, which drinks had high margins, what biscuits could be stocked up—the owner kept a mental ledger. Prices were not necessarily the lowest and the selection not necessarily the largest, but credit, home delivery, casual chat, and years of trust formed the little store's moat.

Now, quantity-discount snack stores like Haoxianglai have brought a different set of rules to county towns and townships: bright sales floors, densely packed shelves, sales by weight, frequent new arrivals, and procurement and distribution organized centrally by headquarters. For consumers, this means more choices, clearer prices, and a more consistent shopping experience; for mom-and-pop stores, the truly thorny problem is not just that a new store opened next door, but that their familiar ways of sourcing, pricing, and selecting products are coming up against a scaled system.

Whether this change will cause mom-and-pop stores to disappear cannot yet be answered by public data. But disclosures from listed companies already reveal a deeper layer of competition: quantity-discount snacks are competing not only for snack sales revenue, but also for redistributing procurement power, product selection power, product definition power, and customer traffic gateways in township retail.

What has moved into townships is not just a signboard

First, look at the pace of expansion. Wan Chen Group disclosed that as of June 30, 2026, its quantity-discount snack business had a total of 23,802 stores, covering 31 provincial-level administrative regions nationwide; in the first half of 2026, it added 5,814 stores and closed 326, for a net increase of 5,488.

From the end of 2024 to the end of June 2026, stores increased from 14,196 to 23,802, a net increase of 9,606 in 18 months.

These figures belong to Wan Chen Group's quantity-discount snack business and cannot all be equated with the single Haoxianglai brand, nor can they be used to calculate Haoxianglai's penetration rate in townships. Wan Chen did not disclose the share of stores in county towns and townships, and the group's stores still show clear regional concentration: as of the end of June 2026, East China had 12,532 stores, accounting for 52.65% of the total. National coverage and regional balance are not the same thing.

Minmin Henmang provides a more direct industry reference point. As of the end of June 2026, Minmin Henmang Group had 26,405 stores, about 60% of which were located in county towns and townships, covering 1,480 counties; stores in third-tier and lower-tier cities numbered 17,169, accounting for 65.0%.

The above figures are also at the group level, including Snack Busy and Zhao Yiming Snacks, and cannot be attributed to any single brand.

Putting the two sets of data together, at least one thing can be confirmed: the downward expansion of quantity-discount snacks into county areas and townships has already gone beyond the trial scope of a single company. The consumer foundation supporting expansion does indeed exist. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that in 2025, rural consumer goods retail sales were 6.823 trillion yuan, up 4.1% year on year, higher than the 3.6% growth in urban areas.

However, rural social consumer goods retail sales accounted for only about 13.61% of the national total, and "rural" is classified by place of operation, usually excluding county towns, so this set of data cannot be packaged as the "county and township market share."

The other side is the population constraint. At the end of 2025, the rural resident population was 451.09 million, a decrease of 13.69 million from 2024. Rural consumption growth and population shrinkage are occurring at the same time, meaning that going downstream is not a blue ocean without cost boundaries.

Population density, consumption frequency, rent, and delivery radius will still determine whether a store can survive over the long term.

Behind the cheapness, procurement power is becoming centralized

The most visible aspect of quantity-discount snacks is price, but what is truly hard to replicate is the organizational method behind the price.

In 2025, Wan Chen Group's quantity-discount snack business revenue was 50.857 billion yuan, of which wholesale supply revenue was 49.633 billion yuan, accounting for about 97.6%. In the first half of 2026, revenue from this business was 34.521 billion yuan, up 54.49% year on year. Wan Chen's main commercial chain is therefore quite clear: headquarters conducts centralized procurement, then supplies a vast network of franchise stores, and earns revenue through the markup between purchase and sale.

As of the end of June 2026, Wan Chen had 58 ambient warehouses and 10 cold-chain cold storage facilities, and stores typically carried about 1,800 to 2,000 SKUs, covering 12 core categories. Minmin Henmang had 66 warehouses in the same period, with total warehousing area of about 1.5687 million square meters. It disclosed that the distance from stores to the nearest warehouse is usually within 300 kilometers, and said it can generally achieve 24-hour delivery;

Minmin Henmang usually requires each store to maintain at least 1,800 SKUs.

Once warehouses, order systems, and the store network are connected, headquarters can aggregate consumer demand scattered across different regions into large-scale orders. Mom-and-pop stores usually face order lists provided by regional distributors, while quantity-discount snack headquarters have the opportunity to negotiate directly with manufacturers on quantity, price, delivery cycles, and regional product mixes. In 2025, Wan Chen's top five suppliers had total procurement of about 6.361 billion yuan, accounting for only 12.12% of total annual procurement.

This cannot prove that Wan Chen has absolute bargaining power in every category, but it at least shows that procurement is not highly dependent on a small number of suppliers, leaving more room to replace and combine sources of goods.

Scale is also changing "what products get produced." Wan Chen has disclosed that it is advancing product co-creation with manufacturers, developing customized products and private-label goods, and adjusting combinations according to price, quality, specifications, quantity, and regional demand. As of the end of June 2026, Minmin Henmang had a 338-person product selection team, and also disclosed that it develops customized products together with suppliers; orders can specify SKU, quantity, purchase price, quality standards, and packaging style.

Haoxianglai and Minmin Henmang are still snack retail channels and are not directly equivalent to food manufacturers. But when a channel can participate in designing specifications, packaging, flavors, and price bands, the sales floor is no longer merely passively displaying manufacturers' products. Sales data are converted into procurement scale, and procurement scale is then converted into product definition capability. This is the gap that township mom-and-pop stores find hardest to close relying on single-store experience.

What is being squeezed for mom-and-pop stores is the price space for standardized goods

For consumers, the value brought by chain systems is not illusory. More SKUs, more frequent new arrivals, unified display, and relatively transparent prices have improved the past problems in some township retail markets of limited choices, vague pricing, and slow product turnover. Supply chains compressing intermediate links may also pass some efficiency gains on to consumers.

Pressure first falls on standardized goods whose prices can be compared. When drinks, potato chips, and biscuits of the same brand and same specifications are displayed in different stores, consumers can easily compare prices. The markup space that mom-and-pop stores once retained through information asymmetry and convenience may be compressed by the low-margin, high-turnover model of quantity-discount stores.

If quantity-discount brands further introduce customized specifications, mom-and-pop stores may even find it difficult to find exactly identical products for direct price comparison, and price competition then shifts to who can define specifications and who can control the product mix.

Listed company gross margins can show how this model operates, but cannot do the accounting for franchisees. In the first half of 2026, the gross margin of snack products in Wan Chen's quantity-discount snack business was 12.74%; Minmin Henmang Group's overall gross margin was 11.5%.

The two companies disclose on different bases, so this cannot be used to judge whose stores are more profitable. Headquarters revenue and gross margin reflect the headquarters supply and service system, while franchisees must independently bear rent, labor, inventory, shrinkage, and daily operating risks.

As of the end of June 2026, Minmin Henmang had 26,396 franchise stores, accounting for 99.97% of total stores; in the first half of 2026, it opened 4,590 and closed 121. Wan Chen had 326 fewer stores in the same period, but did not break down operational exits and other reasons.

The number of store openings proves that capital and franchisees are still entering, and the number of closures or reductions cannot be directly interpreted as losses. Without single-store revenue, payback period, duration of continuous operation, and the distribution of franchisee profits, any conclusion that "franchising is guaranteed to make money" or that there are "mass bankruptcies" does not hold up.

Mom-and-pop stores also lack a nationwide unified operating database. "How many mom-and-pop stores are there nationwide" and "how many closed after quantity-discount stores entered" currently have no sufficiently reliable, comparable first-hand data. What can be confirmed is the competitive mechanism: when chain headquarters use tens of thousands of stores to aggregate procurement demand, traditional small stores will come under pressure in their autonomy to select goods and their profit space in standardized snacks.

As for whether the pressure has already translated into declining foot traffic, worsening profits, and closures, it is still necessary to return to specific townships and verify with same-specification prices, sourcing costs, and turnover before and after opening.

Mom-and-pop stores will not disappear out of thin air, but they must answer anew "what to sell"

The weakness of mom-and-pop stores is scale, while their strength is being embedded in local life. Quantity-discount snacks excel at standardization, replicability, and high turnover, while mom-and-pop stores still possess acquaintance-based credit, business hours, temporary needs, delivery radius, and local preferences. Cigarettes and alcohol, fresh food, breakfast, frozen treats, daily necessities, local foods, parcel collection, recharge and bill payment, and instant delivery may all constitute survival space beyond standardized snacks.

The real dividing line may lie in whether mom-and-pop stores still treat standard packaged snacks as their main source of profit: continuing to compete with large chains over the same products and the same prices offers limited odds of success; shifting toward high-frequency essentials, local supply, and immediate services means small stores still have value that chain systems cannot fully cover.

The policy direction is also not simply to phase out small stores. In recent years, county-level commercial construction has emphasized filling gaps in warehousing and distribution, cold chains, and township commercial facilities, and has also proposed transforming existing outlets through chain operations, supply chains, and digitalization. For mom-and-pop stores, another path may be to plug into a larger procurement and distribution system, retain the owner, location, and community relationships, while ceding part of product selection and supply chain autonomy.

This path also has costs. Unified supply can lower procurement costs, but it will also make small stores more dependent on platform rules; digitalization improves turnover efficiency, but may also further concentrate sales data and pricing power at headquarters.

Whether mom-and-pop stores can complete the transformation ultimately depends on whether the cost reductions and customer traffic gains obtained after ceding part of their autonomy can cover service fees, renovation investment, and profit sharing.

A scaled network can improve procurement efficiency, but it cannot guarantee that every store has enough customer traffic. Rapid store openings may also bring overlapping site selection and franchisee operating quality problems. Mom-and-pop stores will not exit immediately because of a new signboard, and quantity-discount stores will not automatically win every township on low prices alone.

Final notes

After Haoxianglai moved into townships, consumers can choose products with lower trial-and-error costs, and county and township retail has also gained supply efficiency closer to that of cities. This is the value genuinely created by the quantity-discount model. The question is whether, when efficiency becomes the reason for expansion, the benefits and risks flow to the same group of people in step.

Headquarters allocate product mixes based on sales data and earn revenue through supply and services; franchisees invest capital, rent stores, and bear labor, shrinkage, and fluctuations in customer traffic; mom-and-pop stores guard a location and community relationships that cannot be moved, while also facing thinning profits on standardized goods.

All three types of operators participate in the transformation of county and township retail, but the degree to which they control the rules and bear the risks is not the same.

Therefore, to measure the modernization of county and township retail, we cannot look only at how many more stores have opened and how much cheaper the products are. We should also ask: when a store fails to meet the system's required turnover speed, who bears the exit cost; when headquarters continues to expand scale, can franchisees share in commensurate efficiency gains;

when mom-and-pop stores plug into chain supply chains, are small stores actually upgrading, or are they exchanging operating autonomy for a heavier form of labor.

A row of new shelves will eventually grow old. What truly determines the commercial order of townships is who has the right to set the rules, and who pays when the rules fail.