Mingming is very busy and really wants to announce the weighing system reform plan: daily scale calibration, and real-time transmission of every data point back to headquarters.

The recent weighing controversies in the bulk snack industry are prompting two leading companies to fill a blind spot in their store management.

On September 7, Mingming is Busy and Haoxianglai issued responses to the issue of weighing in their stores, stating that they had proactively contacted the market supervision department and cooperated with the investigation, and announced an upgrade to their weighing management mechanism.

Both companies require all stores nationwide to be equipped with standardized weights, and to calibrate the scales before opening each day to ensure accuracy before commencing operations. They also launched a nationwide scale monitoring system to transmit the weight data of each bulk item back to headquarters in real time, ensuring traceability and preventing tampering.

In the past, once consumers left the store, they often faced difficulties in providing evidence of abnormal weighing; the store might also explain it as a system malfunction or employee error, making it difficult to clarify the specific responsibility.

This rectification effort is essentially an attempt to simultaneously address both pre-event and in-process oversight. Combined with supervisory inspections and accountability measures, headquarters is trying to close the management loopholes that previously relied on store self-discipline and only investigated problems after they occurred.

At the same time, both companies made the same compensation commitment: once a store has a weighing and pricing error and it is verified, they will compensate ten times the price difference of the wrongly weighed goods, and a special fund will be established to ensure its implementation.

This round of rectification stems from previous weighing disputes.

A consumer in Hebei Province previously reported that when purchasing four pieces of beef jerky from Zhao Yiming Snacks, the initial payment was 64.58 yuan, but after re-weighing, the corresponding amount was only 17.29 yuan. Haoxianglai was also exposed for a case where a consumer initially paid 111 yuan, but after re-weighing, the price dropped to 64.8 yuan.

Subsequently, market supervision departments in many regions conducted special inspections on metrology at bulk snack stores. The Baotou market supervision department included in its inspection scope issues such as whether electronic scales had been modified or tampered with, and whether they had been calibrated on schedule. In Funing, Jiangsu, inspections revealed that some stores had problems such as improper management of scales and inadequate implementation of metrological coding.

For the headquarters of leading mass-market snack brands, theoretically, there is no direct economic incentive to systematically overcharge consumers by weighing their food.

The reason is that both companies' core business models are based on franchising and supply chain management. The headquarters mainly earns the profit from the price difference generated by supplying goods to franchisees, rather than participating in the revenue sharing of retail sales.

The extra revenue generated from abnormal weighing directly benefits the individual franchise stores. Conversely, if an individual store violates weighing regulations, the headquarters bears the risks to the brand reputation, oversight, and the entire franchise network.

The problem therefore lies more in the management radius between headquarters and terminal stores.

Currently, Mingming is very busy and Haoxianglai are still in the rapid expansion phase.

As of the end of June 2026, Mingming Very Busy had 26,400 stores, with a net increase of 4,457 stores in the first half of the year; Haoxianglai's parent company, Wancheng Group, had approximately 23,800 supermarket snack stores, with a net increase of 5,488 stores in the first half of the year.

The expansion of store scale inevitably increases management difficulty. For tens of thousands of franchised stores, increasing the cost of violations is important, but more fundamentally, it is about increasing the probability of violations being detected.

Whether this mechanism can be effective ultimately depends on whether anomalies can be detected and dealt with in a timely manner, and whether the inspection and punishment mechanism can be maintained in a long-term and normalized manner, rather than being a "one-off" surprise inspection.

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