On-the-spot investigation into Shijiazhuang's internet-famous "Mooncake Village": the average daily output reaches 200 tons in the peak season, and the 20-yuan mooncakes are selling extremely well.
"Some customers start queuing at the gate at 4 or 5 a.m. During peak periods, we can only impose purchase limits, otherwise the factory's production capacity cannot keep up," the person in charge of the Yujia Mooncake store in Huangzhuang Village told Times Finance.
Known for high cost-effectiveness, crispy crust and rich fillings, "Huangzhuang Mooncakes" have remained popular on social media in the past two years. The total view count of a single topic related to "Huangzhuang Mooncakes" on a social platform has reached 190 million, and many review influencers with millions of followers have posted evaluation content about them.
On September 23, Times Finance went to Huangzhuang Village for an on-site visit. As the Mid-Autumn Festival is approaching, the roads in the village are once again full of motor vehicles, and there are even tourists from other provinces and cities such as Shandong and Tianjin who drive here specially to buy mooncakes.
On a main road in the village that is dominated by mooncake sales, multiple red banners are particularly eye-catching, listing the names and contact information of hundreds of mooncake workshops and stores in the village.
According to local villagers, even in the non-peak season outside the Mid-Autumn Festival period, some merchants will set up stalls to sell mooncakes around schools.
Survived by raising chickens in the past, now the top trending mooncake brand in Hebei Province
The mooncake industry in Huangzhuang Village did not grow overnight.
Huangzhuang Village is under the jurisdiction of Jiumen Township, Gaocheng District, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province. It borders Zhengding New Area (the area where Shijiazhuang Airport is located) to the west, and is about 25 kilometers away from the main urban area of Shijiazhuang, with a normal driving time of about 40 minutes.
The on-site visit by Times Finance found that on the way to Huangzhuang Village from the urban area, you will pass Shijiazhuang Olympic Sports Center and Sasseur Outlets, both of which are only about 15 minutes' drive from Huangzhuang Village. Meanwhile, the new Gaocheng campus of Hebei GEO University is also located within three kilometers of the village. The passenger flow advantage brought by geographical location is very obvious. Local citizens who come for shopping and watching competitions, as well as college students on campus, have all become potential consumer groups for Huangzhuang mooncakes.
Photo by Times Finance
A villager told Times Finance that the village initially only had small workshops for mooncake processing. Customers provided raw materials such as rice, flour and oil, and the stores only charged processing fees. Later, the scale gradually expanded, and some families developed their own unique flavors before gradually establishing their own brands.
According to public reports such as the official website of the Gaocheng District Government, in 2018, there were only 6 small mooncake processing workshops in the whole village; the number increased to 46 in 2023; it reached 83 in 2025 with an output value exceeding 100 million yuan; in 2026, the number of mooncake production enterprises in the whole village has reached 113, with a daily output of about 200 tons in peak seasons.
Tian Yafeng, Secretary of the Party Branch of Huangzhuang Village, said with emotion in an interview with the media that although the village has the traditional craft of making mooncakes, the main industries in the past were chicken farming and feed production. "No one expected that one day mooncakes would become the main industry of the whole village."
At around 11 a.m., Times Finance came to a store named "Yujia Mooncake" with high passenger flow in the village. At this time, the queue outside the store was nearly 100 meters long. The store person in charge told Times Finance that since the beginning of August this year, the passenger flow of the store has gradually increased. Recently, it is the peak passenger flow period of the whole year, and the average daily turnover of the main store can reach 70,000 to 80,000 yuan. In addition, they have also opened branch stores near Zhengding and the Outlets.
In 2020, "Yujia Mooncake" also registered a trademark, continuously expanding the brand's influence in the province and even across the country.
In terms of price, taking Yujia Mooncake as an example, there are more than 30 categories in the store, and the unit price of most products is concentrated at 12-20 yuan. The lowest-priced products are crispy red bean mooncakes and crispy pea mooncakes, while the highest-priced product is this year's new "homology of medicine and food" series, with a unit price of 22 yuan per pack. The more popular varieties are concentrated on classic fillings such as egg yolk and chestnut. The store also launched Mid-Autumn Festival gift box sets: the simple gift box requires an additional 8 yuan, and the deluxe gift box requires an additional 40 yuan.
Times Finance found that there is a clear gap between several leading brands in the village and other relatively less well-known brands. Even if the price of scattered street vendors is 5-8 yuan lower than that of well-known brands, almost no one patronizes them. "Since we have come to buy offline, we definitely want to buy the most 'authentic' ones," a queuing consumer told Times Finance.
Popular categories of brands such as Yujia, Yinainai and Boxiangcun are often out of stock, which even gave rise to the daigou (personal shopper) business in the village. The Yujia egg yolk crispy mooncake with an original price of 15 yuan per pack is sold by daigou with a markup of 10 yuan per pack, and the markup range varies according to the degree of shortage of different categories.
A survey conducted by the China Bakery and Sugar Products Industry Association in August 2026 shows that the sales volume of high-end mooncake gift boxes priced above 1,000 yuan plummeted by 76% year-on-year, and the proportion of gift boxes priced above 500 yuan in conventional channels has dropped from 7.2% in 2023 to less than 2%. In contrast, the market share of affordable and simple gift boxes priced from 68 yuan to 200 yuan has exceeded 60%, and the sales of simple-packaged mooncakes with unit price within 80 yuan account for 78% of the total sales.
Huangzhuang mooncakes are precisely catching the consumption trend of high cost-performance ratio.
One brand cooperated with "Yu Hui Tong Hang", with single product sales of about 6 million yuan
Although they all belong to the Huangzhuang mooncake industry, the development models of several leading local brands are different.
A number of local merchants represented by Yujia still continue the traditional family workshop operation model. Such merchants mainly rely on the market reputation accumulated through word-of-mouth among consumers, pay more attention to the long-term stability of industrial operation, hold a cautious attitude towards expanding production capacity, and will not choose to invest a large amount of funds at one time to expand production scale.
"Many large chain supermarkets have approached us for supply, but we rejected them, because our factory cannot support such a large volume. The current factory has already been upgraded, but the daily output is limited and cannot supply too many channels," said the person in charge of Yujia Mooncake.
Another leading large-scale brand in the village, "Boxiangcun", adopts a more commercialized operation strategy. The brand was officially established in 2025, and in 2026 it has settled in leading supermarkets such as RT-Mart, Jiajiayue, Biyoute, Yonghui, Hualian, as well as the boutique supermarket Ole system.
Han Baowen, Chairman of Boxiangcun, told Times Finance, "Boxiangcun is not the first player in this field. But we don't compete for downstream customers with other villagers, we only operate at a higher dimension, so that we can drive the whole industry to develop upwards."
In addition, Boxiangcun has also cooperated with many top live-streaming influencers, including cooperating with "Yu Hui Tong Hang" and customizing exclusive products for it. According to the introduction, the sales of this single product this year is about 6 million yuan. In the 2026 Mid-Autumn Festival season, Boxiangcun also completed three export orders to South Korea and Australia.
The explosive popularity of Huangzhuang mooncakes has driven the upstream and downstream enterprises of the entire industrial chain in the village.
During the on-site visit in the village, Times Finance found that many manufacturers have enriched their recruitment positions to adapt to the development of e-commerce channels. In addition to recruiting traditional mooncake making workers, manufacturers also select villagers with excellent expression skills to take charge of online live streaming work, and recruit other positions such as video editors and cameramen at the same time. According to China News Service, the Huangzhuang mooncake industry has driven more than 3,000 people in surrounding areas to get employed.
Huangzhuang mooncakes are a hit, but the trademark does not belong to Huangzhuang?
However, with the explosive popularity of Huangzhuang mooncakes, market chaos has also emerged. Recently, some consumers reported that they had bad experiences when buying Huangzhuang mooncakes online: the packaging, specifications and taste are uneven, and after checking the origin, they found that the mooncakes were not produced in Huangzhuang.
After investigation by Times Finance, it is found that the production technique of Huangzhuang mooncakes was included in the intangible cultural heritage list of Shijiazhuang City in 2018, but the "Huangzhuang Mooncake" trademark is not held by the enterprises in the origin area.
The trademark information platform shows that the "Huangzhuang Mooncake" trademark (application No. 41656602) was successfully registered by a Xiamen-based company on October 16, 2019, and the exclusive right period will last until September 13, 2030. At the same time, the company has as many as 84 trademark information records under its name, and is still continuously applying for a series of trademarks such as "Huangzhuang Mooncake", "Huangzhuang Crispy Cake" and "Huangzhuang Village Pastry".
It is worth mentioning that Shijiazhuang Yuhangtongxing Food Co., Ltd. published a notice in the newspaper on July 23, 2025, stating that it has owned all the rights of the Class 30 trademark "Huangzhuang Mooncake" since December 24, 2024.
However, public judicial information shows that the aforementioned Xiamen-based company was once involved in a trademark right transfer contract dispute as a third party, with the plaintiff including Shijiazhuang Yuhangtongxing Food Co., Ltd., and the filing date was January 2026. On September 10, the company was filed for enforcement of 2.3404 million yuan by Qiaoxi District People's Court of Shijiazhuang.
According to the China Trademark Office website, as of September 11, the trademark transfer business of the Class 30 "Huangzhuang Mooncake" trademark is at the stage of "issuing the disapproval notice".
Source: Tianyancha
In addition, on May 27, 2025, Huangzhuang Village Joint-stock Economic Cooperative submitted a trademark application for "Huangzhuang Mooncake", which is an application for regional public brands in the direction of collective trademarks, and the review process has now reached the "substantive examination" stage.
"Taoli has launched 'Huangzhuang-style mooncakes', and everyone is catching up on the trend of Huangzhuang mooncakes. This also shows that the traditional mooncake market is really difficult to operate. Even large brands have to enter the niche track like Huangzhuang mooncakes to get a share of the market, which means the original business format is very hard to sustain," Han Baowen pointed out to Times Finance.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Times Finance APP" (ID: tf-app), author: Li Weiqi, editor: Li Qian, published with authorization from 36Kr.