Is the ultimate fate of selling snacks selling groceries? Bestore ventures into the supermarket track.

Snack shops seem destined to inevitably end up selling vegetables.

On May 16, "Bestore · Fresh Life" Hanguang store officially opened at Wuhan Hankou Urban Plaza, becoming the company's first new-format supermarket in China.

From the perspective of its product range, this store is no longer just a traditional snack shop. It has introduced categories such as fresh ingredients, freshly-made cooked food, freshly-baked bread, ready-to-eat daily products, refrigerated and frozen items, aiming to cover consumers' needs for all three daily meals, and positioning itself as a "community kitchen."

This company, once known for “premium snacks,” has begun to reach into more frequent and daily community consumption scenarios.

"Opening supermarkets" has become a necessary attempt for snack industry players to escape fierce competition.

In the past few years, bulk snack stores expanded rapidly, reshaping industry competition with lower prices, higher turnover, and more efficient supply chains. The brand premium that Bestore established based on "quality snacks" has been significantly squeezed.

Compared with online snack consumption and price competition of bulk stores, community supermarkets are closer to the daily meal scenarios and can more easily create differentiation through immediacy, convenience and non-standard products.

Especially, “fresh snacks” such as short-shelf-life, freshly-made, and semi-ready-to-eat products naturally carry non-standard attributes. They help increase consumption frequency and retain some brand premium.

However, the advantage of short-shelf-life products lies in freshness and experience, but the difficulty is in scaling up.

The shelf life of "fresh snacks" has been shortened from more than half a year for traditional snacks to three to seven days, which means supply chain turnover, store waste, staff operations, and quality control standards all become more complicated. If pursuing rapid expansion, trade-offs may have to be made between price, waste, or quality control.

Different players have different solutions for this.

In recent years, Three Squirrels has emphasized building its own factories and transforming its supply chain, aiming to increase gross profit margin through proprietary brands and manufacturing capabilities. Its supermarket-style stores “Three Squirrels Life Pavilion” have self-owned brands accounting for 80-90%.

Bulk snack groups rely more on large-scale supplier systems and store networks, maximizing efficiency advantages.

By contrast, Bestore has long stuck to the OEM model, with a high proportion of products outsourced, and only deployed its own production capacity in certain segments. This means that after entering the supermarket format, the company needs to fill gaps not only in product range, but also in more complex short-shelf-life, freshly-made and fresh supply chain capabilities.

Financial constraints cannot be ignored.

In 2025, Bestore pushed for large-scale store adjustments, closing 719 stores throughout the year, facing operating pressure and suffering losses.

However, cash flow has improved. The 2025 annual report shows net cash flow from operating activities was 412 million yuan, up 7038% year-on-year and a significant increase from 5.77 million yuan in 2024.

This provides some buffer for testing new formats. But if “Fresh Life” moves from single-store trials to large-scale rollouts, it will place higher demands on supply chain, store renovations, operations teams, and cash flow.

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