Order a punnet of imported cherries in Shanghai and a rider can be at your door in under an hour. That kind of convenience hides how brutal the business behind it actually is. Fresh food, 生鲜 as it is called locally, is one of the biggest categories in Chinese retail and one of the least forgiving. Billions of dollars have been burned trying to make ultra-fast fresh delivery work, and some of the loudest names in the space no longer exist. If you are an importer sizing up this market, you need to know what actually survived the shakeout, and why.
Olivier Verot has run GMA from Shanghai since 2012 and has advised food and beverage brands on which of China’s fresh food channels actually fit their product. He has watched three fresh delivery unicorns rise and fall in that time.
How Big Is China’s Fresh Food Market, Really?
Chinese consumers spend well over 9 trillion yuan a year on food, and fresh produce, meat, dairy and seafood make up a large share of that spending. Fresh food e-commerce alone was already worth 25.8% of urban households’ total food spending back in 2022, and the segment has kept climbing since. Industry researchers now put the fresh e-commerce market on track to cross roughly 630 billion yuan in 2026, up from about 364 billion yuan in 2022.
What that growth curve hides is how unevenly the market is actually split. Wet markets, the open-air stalls selling loose vegetables and live fish, are not a nostalgic holdover. In most Chinese cities they are still where the majority of everyday fresh produce changes hands, because they are cheap, close, and let shoppers see and touch what they are buying before they pay. Supermarkets and hypermarkets come next, and they are where imported and premium fresh goods get discovered. E-commerce and instant retail are the smallest slice by volume but the fastest growing, and the one that actually matters if you are shipping product in from overseas.
| Channel | Role in the market | Delivery promise | What a foreign brand realistically sells here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wet markets | Still the default for daily vegetables, live fish and cheap fruit in most cities | Walk-in, same day | Almost nothing. Imported goods rarely fit this channel |
| Supermarkets and hypermarkets (Hema, Yonghui, Sam’s Club) | Where imported and premium fresh products get discovered and trusted | Same day, in-store | Premium fruit, cheese, wine, packaged meat and seafood |
| Fresh e-commerce and instant retail (Dingdong, Xiaoxiang Chaoshi, Duoduo Maicai) | Roughly a quarter of urban fresh food spend, still growing | 30 minutes to next-day, depending on the platform | High-value, relatively durable goods: aged cheese, frozen seafood, premium fruit boxes |
The 30-Minute Delivery Crash
For a few years, the story of Chinese fresh food e-commerce was a race to shrink delivery time to almost nothing. Startups built networks of small “front warehouses” (前置仓) inside residential districts, stocked with a few hundred fresh SKUs, promising delivery in 30 minutes or less. It worked, until the bill came due.
Missfresh (每日优鲜) is the clearest cautionary tale. It listed on Nasdaq in June 2021 as China’s first pure-play online grocer, backed by Tencent and once valued near 3 billion dollars. Thirteen months later, in July 2022, it suspended its core on-demand grocery delivery and laid off most of its staff, telling Chinese media the move was meant to “ensure the maximization of profitability.” It never recovered. By 2023 it had stopped fresh operations entirely, was delisted from Nasdaq that November, and reportedly owed close to 2 billion yuan in unpaid supplier debts (TechNode). Missfresh was not alone. A wave of smaller front-warehouse operators folded the same year, sunk by the same math: fresh SKUs spoil fast, warehouses cost money to run half-empty, and 30-minute delivery is expensive to staff no matter how many orders come in.
Who Survived, and Why
The operators still standing in 2026 did one of two things: they built genuine scale in the front-warehouse model and found a way to make the unit economics work, or they never fully committed to 30-minute delivery in the first place.
Dingdong Maicai (叮咚买菜) is the clearest example of the first path. It kept the front-warehouse model but grew into it: 2024 GMV reached 25.56 billion yuan, up 16.3%, with its first full year of GAAP profitability, and it stayed profitable for seven straight quarters into 2025. That discipline made it valuable enough that in February 2026, Meituan agreed to acquire 100% of Dingdong’s China business for an initial 717 million US dollars, folding in more than 1,000 front warehouses and roughly 7 million monthly buyers. Even the segment’s best-run survivor needed a bigger balance sheet behind it to keep going (Caixin Global).
Freshippo (盒马), Alibaba’s grocery arm, took the second path. It walked back its own earlier bet on small standalone forward warehouses and shifted toward large-format stores that combine a full supermarket with online fulfilment from the same shelf. That bet paid off: Freshippo reported its first full year of profitability around 2025 and planned close to 100 new large-format stores, pushing its store count past 500, while quietly shrinking underperforming formats like its membership stores, down to five nationwide. Meituan’s own grocery arm followed a similar logic, rebranding from Meituan Maicai to Xiaoxiang Chaoshi (小象超市) in December 2023 and expanding from a produce delivery app into a full-category retailer carrying more than 10,000 SKUs.
Pinduoduo’s Duoduo Maicai runs a different model entirely: community group buying, where orders are aggregated overnight and picked up the next day at a local station rather than delivered to the door. It is cheaper to run than a front warehouse, which is exactly why it survived, but it is a poor fit for anything that needs a continuous cold chain, since the product sits unrefrigerated at the pickup point for hours.
Cold Chain: The Real Bottleneck for an Importer
Every platform above is, underneath the app, a cold chain logistics company wearing a retail brand. That is the part most foreign brands underestimate. China’s cold chain logistics market carried 381.4 million tons of goods in 2025, up 4.5% year on year, generating 556.7 billion yuan in revenue, up 3.84%. Cold storage capacity grew to 267 million cubic meters, and refrigerated truck sales jumped 30.2% to nearly 82,000 units, with electric refrigerated trucks now representing close to 45% of that fleet. The domestic market is forecast to pass 585 billion yuan in 2026, and international research firms put the broader China cold chain market above 100 billion US dollars this year, still growing at double digits (Mordor Intelligence).
None of that capacity belongs to you as an importer. Your product has to survive customs inspection, a bonded cold warehouse, a domestic cold chain carrier, and the last-mile front warehouse of whichever platform you sell through, with a temperature excursion at any single link enough to get a shipment rejected or quietly written off. This is also a regulatory question, not just a logistics one: imported meat, dairy and seafood need CIQ registration and an approved cold chain facility before they can legally enter distribution, on top of the usual import license and labeling requirements. Brands that treat cold chain as an afterthought, something to sort out after the marketing plan, are the ones that lose a container of stock to a customs delay or a warehouse mix-up in year one.
What a Foreign Brand Can Actually Sell Fresh
The practical lesson from the last five years is simple: do not try to sell what is genuinely fragile. Leafy greens, soft unripened cheese, delicate berries and anything with a shelf life measured in days will not survive the gaps in a cold chain you do not control, no matter how good the product is. What does travel well, and sells at a margin that can absorb the logistics cost, is a narrower list: premium fruit with a real shelf life (citrus, stone fruit, some varieties of grape and cherry), aged and hard cheeses, frozen or vacuum-chilled meat, and frozen or live seafood tied to a clear origin story.
Valeria runs a small cheese maker outside Parma, exporting aged Parmigiano and fresh burrata to Shanghai and Hangzhou through a local importer. For nearly two years, her fresh burrata sold through a 30-minute instant retail app, and close to 18% of orders came back damaged or spoiled, wiping out the category’s margin entirely. She tried tighter packaging and a faster courier contract, and the return rate barely moved, because the problem was not the last kilometre, it was the twelve hours before it. What worked was pulling burrata out of instant delivery altogether and putting the aged Parmigiano, which travels for months rather than days, into Hema’s imported goods section and Tmall Global’s standard 5 to 7 day fulfilment, backed by Xiaohongshu recipe content built around the cheese rather than the brand. Returns on the aged range dropped under 2%, and revenue from that single SKU line grew by roughly 40% over the following year, once the product stopped fighting the supply chain it was sold through.
Getting the logistics right only gets a fresh food brand onto a shelf. Getting found is a separate job. Xiaohongshu is where most Chinese consumers now discover an unfamiliar imported cheese or cut of meat, usually through a recipe or a home cook’s review rather than an ad. A WeChat mini program tied to your own store keeps repeat buyers ordering directly instead of re-searching a platform each time.
And a Baidu-indexed website, built with basic Chinese SEO in mind, still matters for anyone searching your brand name directly, since choosing the right distribution partner does not replace being findable on your own. None of this fixes a bad cold chain. It only pays off once the cold chain already works.
If you are weighing which of these categories fits your product, our guide to exporting food to China walks through the licensing and platform side in more detail, and our breakdowns of the cheese market, seafood exports and dairy exports go category by category. If refrigeration hardware and cold storage buildout is closer to your business, we also cover the refrigeration compressor market separately.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a foreign brand sell genuinely fresh, perishable food directly to Chinese consumers?
Yes, but only if you or your distributor control the full cold chain from port to doorstep, which is expensive and hard to guarantee end to end. Most foreign brands get better margins and fewer losses by selling categories with a longer shelf life, such as aged cheese, frozen meat or frozen seafood, rather than competing head-on with fragile, ultra-fresh produce.
How long does it actually take to get cold chain product from Europe into a Chinese warehouse?
Sea freight to a bonded cold warehouse typically runs 25 to 40 days depending on origin and port, plus customs and CIQ inspection time. Air freight can cut that to under a week but costs several times more, and only makes sense for high-margin categories like fresh seafood or specific fruit. Either way, budget time for CIQ registration of your facility and product before the first shipment, not after.
Is Tmall Global or a platform like Hema better for a first entry into fresh food?
They solve different problems. Tmall Global suits products with a longer shelf life and lets you skip a full import license through the cross-border bonded model, but delivery takes days. Hema and similar supermarket-e-commerce hybrids get your product in front of shoppers physically and build trust faster, but require a full import license and a domestic cold chain partner. Many brands use Tmall Global to test demand before committing to Hema’s shelves.
Do we need a Chinese import license to sell fresh cheese, meat or seafood in China?
For domestic distribution through supermarkets or Hema, yes: you need CIQ registration for the product and the originating facility, plus a standard food import license held by your Chinese entity or importer of record. Selling through the cross-border e-commerce bonded model, such as Tmall Global, avoids the full license requirement but caps you to smaller personal-use parcel sizes and stricter product categories.
GMA has spent over a decade helping food and beverage brands work through China’s cold chain and e-commerce maze, from choosing between Tmall Global and a supermarket listing to building the Xiaohongshu content that gets an unfamiliar imported product tried for the first time. If you are deciding what your brand can realistically sell fresh in China, and through which channel, get in touch with our team.
