Low-sugar budget-friendly mooncakes have emerged as the biggest crowd favorite of this year's Mid-Autumn Festival.

Behind the ongoing heated discussions that mooncakes are "not selling well" dominating trending search lists, the wind direction of this year's Mid-Autumn Festival mooncake market has changed.

In previous years, the mooncake display stacks in shopping malls were usually occupied by exquisitely packaged gift boxes priced at hundreds of yuan. But this year, in addition to affordable gift boxes priced at around 100 to 200 yuan, ordinary single-packaged mooncakes, freshly baked and loose-weight mooncakes are also the most popular among shoppers.

The mooncake gift box consumption driven by interpersonal relationships is gradually giving way to personal use consumption, so lowering the price has become a major new trend in the Mid-Autumn Festival mooncake market.

A report obtained by Jiemian News from the offline retail monitoring agency Mayingying shows that on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 2024, 2025 and 2026, the average price per 100 grams of mooncakes continued to decline, reaching 6.48 yuan, 5.84 yuan and 4.89 yuan respectively.

Chart Source: Mayingying

In addition, data from Qunce Consumer Research also shows that in 2026, the proportion of consumers buying mooncakes for daily personal use and family sharing reached 50.4% and 55.9% respectively, while the proportion of traditional gifting scenarios was only 42.5%, making personal use consumption the core demand of the mooncake market. At the same time, the market price structure continues to sink, and the sales volume of affordable and simple gift boxes priced at 68 to 200 yuan accounts for more than 60%.

Jiemian News visited Hema supermarkets in Beijing before the Mid-Autumn Festival and found that gift box products priced at around 100 yuan are placed in prominent positions. The discounted prices of mooncake gift boxes from Daoxiangcun, Hema's own brand and Disney range from 106 yuan to 198 yuan.

Daoxiangcun mooncake gift box sold at Hema Photo by Jiemian News, Ma Yue

Hema private brand mooncake gift box Photo by Jiemian News, Ma Yue

As mooncakes are more often bought for personal consumption, consumers' requirements for formulas and flavors have also begun to affect the product layout of brands. Selling points such as low sugar and low GI (low glycemic index) have become a new direction for mooncake enterprises to compete for the personal consumption market.

The data provided by Mayingying to Jiemian News shows a trend different from the overall price reduction of mooncakes. In its continuous store monitoring samples from traditional offline retail channels, on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival from 2024 to 2026, the number of mooncake products with the "low sugar" concept was 98, 107 and 117 respectively, and the average price per 100 grams rose from 6.77 yuan to 8.20 yuan and 9.67 yuan. In the past two years, the number of such products has increased by about 19%, and the average price has risen by about 43%.

This means that while the overall price range of mooncakes is moving down, low-sugar products are forming a niche market with different price performance. Although the changes in product quantity and average price cannot directly explain the growth of sales volume, it reflects that brands are trying to find new pricing space through formula differences in addition to lowering the price of gift boxes.

Chart Source: Mayingying

A representative from Hema told Jiemian News in an interview that after launching the low-sugar mooncake series last year, it further expanded its product lineup this year, adding low-sugar five-kernel mooncakes, low-sugar flower mooncakes and low-sugar Huangzhuang-style mooncakes, and fully upgraded the three classic loose mooncakes of red bean paste, lotus seed paste and five-kernel to low-sugar versions. At present, the sales of the low-sugar mooncake series have increased by nearly 70% year-on-year, making it the fastest-growing category in its mooncake portfolio.

Jiemian News saw at a Hema supermarket in Beijing that a consumer was comparing several low-sugar mooncakes. She told Jiemian News that when choosing mooncakes this year, she would pay attention to the sugar content and ingredients. "People are more focused on sugar intake in daily life, so we will compare different products when buying mooncakes," she said.

Brands' development of health-focused selling points has also extended from low sugar to low GI, high fiber and whole grain formulas. According to previous reports from Jiemian News, Sam's Club launched products such as low-sugar milk custard osmanthus dual-flavor mooncakes and high-fiber whole grain mooncakes this year. The low-GI mooncake gift box from Guangzhou Restaurant, priced at 258 yuan, was shown as "restocking" on the Sam's Club APP on September 24. These products indicate that segmentation around formulas and raw materials has become a way for retailers to enrich their mooncake offerings.

In addition to adjustments in formulas, "freshly baked" has also become an important selling point for brands to attract personal-use consumers.

Jiemian News' visits found that many baking brands such as Holiland and Luxihe have increased the sale of loose-packaged mooncake products. Luxihe even takes "freshly baked juicy" mooncakes as the selling point of its seasonal limited products, spreading this traditional flavor product that was originally popular in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region to the whole country through its chain stores, with a single mooncake priced at around 5.9 yuan.

Loose-packaged mooncakes and freshly baked mooncakes at Luxihe Photo by Jiemian News, Ma Yue

A relevant person from Luxihe told Jiemian News that the freshly baked pork mooncakes of Luxihe have always sold very well, and this year, in addition to the classic pork flavor, more youthful innovative flavors such as taro paste and black truffle have been added.

Hema also set up a "freshly baked mooncake" zone several weeks before the Mid-Autumn Festival, adding imported ingredients to flavor innovations, such as Australian Wagyu black truffle mooncakes and Iberian ham morel mooncakes, priced at 16.9 yuan per box of 2 pieces.

In addition to new retail and baking brands, time-honored brands are also striving to catch up with the innovation trend.

Jiemian News noticed that in addition to traditional mooncake gift boxes, Taotaoju also launched daily freshly baked mooncakes this year with a best taste period of only 3 days, which are only available for sale in Guangzhou.

"'Freshly baked mooncakes' is not only an observation of the fresh consumption demand, but also a capture of the nostalgic traditional taste. In the past, the mooncakes people bought from the streets during the Mid-Autumn Festival were all freshly baked out of the oven, with a very short shelf life. People focused more on the taste of the mooncake itself, and later the market gradually derived the demand for gift boxes," the Taotaoju brand told Jiemian News in an interview.

Mooncakes with more regional characteristics and niche flavors are also spreading across the country with the help of e-commerce platforms and retailers.

A representative from Hema told Jiemian News that in addition to the well-known Su-style and Cantonese-style mooncakes, Huangzhuang-style mooncakes, Shanghai shredded radish mooncakes, and southwest China's pepper-salt ham mooncakes have also been launched in some cities. Traditional flavors from different regions are brought into more consumption scenarios, allowing mooncakes to retain local food culture while meeting consumers' demand for "trying something different" during the festival.

Fresh pork mooncakes at Hema Photo by Jiemian News, Ma Yue

In fact, the structural change of the 2026 mooncake market is not an overall shrinkage of the industry, but a benign upgrade driven by multiple overlapping factors that leads consumption to return to rationality and the industry to return to its essence.

One important reason is the normalization of policy supervision, which has greatly reduced the chaos of premium pricing and excessive packaging of mooncake gift boxes.

Since four government departments issued a special announcement to curb sky-high priced mooncakes in 2022 and the mandatory national standard GB 23350‑2021 for excessive packaging was fully implemented, the relevant regulatory requirements have remained effective in the long term and are implemented on a regular basis every Mid-Autumn Festival, fundamentally eradicating the long-standing industry chaos of "valuing packaging over products and pursuing high premiums" from the institutional level.

Hard rules such as no more than 3 layers of mooncake packaging, packaging cost caps, prohibition of mixing high-priced free gifts, key supervision of gift boxes priced above 500 yuan, and transaction record retention have directly compressed the arbitrage space of high-end gift boxes. This also drives brands to abandon the marketing path of luxury packaging and sky-high pricing, and instead shift the focus of R&D and costs back to food ingredients and craftsmanship, promoting the overall sinking of the market price range.

On the other hand, the mooncake consumption market is returning to rationality, with personal family use accounting for more than gifting scenarios, which has gradually made mooncakes return to the essence of "festival food" from "social gifts".

At the same time, the national awareness of healthy consumption has fully awakened. After the shortcomings of traditional mooncakes, which are high in oil, sugar and calories, have become prominent, more mooncake brands have begun to compete in the direction of low sugar, low fat, low burden, clean labels and innovative flavors.

To sum up, saying goodbye to the path dependence of gifts and returning to the essence of festive products will become the mainstream direction for the future development of the mooncake market. Under the stock market, quality and refined competition starting from differentiated innovation and segmented scenario exploration will also become increasingly fierce.

This article is from "Jiemian News", written by Ma Yue, edited by YAHAN Xiang, published with authorization from 36Kr.