Overseas brands have fallen one after another, yet this catering business has been revitalized by Chinese players?

A new viral hit has emerged in the baking track — how long will its popularity last this time?

Recently, a wave of new donut brands has sprung up, with some stores maintaining extremely high foot traffic. Customers even need to queue for purchases on workdays, and purchasing agency services have emerged for these products.

In the past, donuts were regarded by many as a "short-lived internet-famous snack", with several well-known foreign brands entering the Chinese market only to exit soon after. After years of silence, is this track about to embrace its second boom?

A group of new donut brands have gone viral!

The baking market is no stranger to specialty stores focused on single star products, such as cheesecakes, croissants, egg tarts, bagels, and soufflés.

Over the past year, many new donut brands have emerged on the market. Their stores are generally small in size, but they have gained tremendous popularity.

Take Bebe Donut as an example. Founded in September 2024, this brand now operates around 10 stores in cities including Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Xiamen, with many more outlets under renovation. During this period, almost every new Bebe Donut store has become an instant hit. Some netizens shared online that the Hangzhou MixC location requires a 30-minute queue even on workdays.

Another example is Nunu Donut, which currently runs 4 stores in Shanghai and Hangzhou. Despite its small scale, it enjoys great popularity, with purchasing agency services appearing on social platforms. Songsong Pupu has about 30 stores, mainly located in second- and third-tier cities such as Foshan, Jiaxing, and Huzhou. According to its Xiaohongshu account, some new stores in Yichang and Hefei recorded a GMV of over 200,000 RMB in their first week of opening.

△ Image source: Screenshot from Xiaohongshu

In addition, brands like CLOUDUNT, Doni Donut, and dOnut Airy Fresh Donuts have also attracted a large number of young customers. At the end of last year, the chain baking brand 85°C also targeted this business, launching a new brand 85°C DONut focused on fresh donuts by opening stores right next to its existing outlets. It now has more than 10 stores in cities including Shanghai, Nanjing, Quanzhou, and Dongguan.

Previous players faded out, donuts are reinventing themselves

In fact, donut specialty stores are not new in the Chinese market, but their overall development has not been smooth.

Famous foreign donut brands Mister Donut and Dunkin' Donuts both entered the Chinese market, but eventually ended up closing their stores and withdrew from the Chinese mainland market in 2019 and 2023 respectively.

Local brands that were once moderately well-known also failed to survive, such as Baze Bite and Mr. Chen's Donuts, which closed their stores one after another in previous years. After that, donut brands in the market basically lost their presence.

It is worth noting that those previous brands mainly focused on American-style donuts, which were absolute high-calorie bombs. This explains why donut stores struggled to succeed in China in the past: as consumers paid more attention to health, desserts heavy in oil and sugar were gradually left behind.

Most of the newly opened donut specialty stores today focus on fresh donuts. This is an innovative category originating from Japan. Compared with American-style donuts, their dough has a higher water content, absorbs less oil during frying, has adjusted sweetness, and features a fluffier and softer texture, which perfectly caters to current consumer preferences.

In terms of appearance, fresh donuts have no hole in the middle. The bread base is cut horizontally, filled with fillings of different flavors, the outer layer is dipped in matcha powder, chocolate powder or icing, and the top is decorated with fruits and nuts. They are colorful, photogenic, and suitable for sharing on social media. Today's young people not only want food to taste good, but also look good and be shareable, and fresh donuts perfectly meet this demand as a form of "social currency".

The practice of adding fillings directly also gives fresh donuts more room for creativity in terms of flavor: various ingredients such as yogurt, fruits, eggs, and beef can all be added, resulting in a very rich variety.

Take the highly popular Bebe Donut as an example. The store offers more than ten types of donuts, including relatively common flavors like traditional British cinnamon sugar and homemade secret light caramel, as well as innovative sweet and savory flavors such as Italian pistachio yogurt, black truffle egg with Italian salami, and deep-sea tuna with corn kernels.

△ Image source: Bebe Donut's Xiaohongshu account

It is clear that compared with traditional donuts, these new stores have made many improvements in the visual presentation, texture, and flavor of their products, thus gaining higher premium potential. However, while young people are willing to pay for good looks, the price cannot be too off-putting. According to Dianping, the per-person spending at these donut specialty stores ranges from 20 RMB to 30 RMB, and the price of a single product is mostly around 10 to 20 RMB, which is not a high consumption threshold and is quite attractive to students and office workers.

For example, the cheapest lemon sage fresh donut at Songsong Pupu costs 8.9 RMB, and the most expensive flaming durian donut is priced at 14.9 RMB. The products of Bebe Donut are also priced between 8.9 RMB and 14.9 RMB, while Nunu Donut is slightly more expensive, ranging from 16 RMB to 21 RMB.

△ Image source: Nunu Donut ordering mini-program

The decoration of most donut specialty stores features a warm Japanese-style design, with a generally small area. Most stores arrange their display cabinets facing the mall aisle, and set up open kitchens so that passersby can watch the donut making process.

To seize popularity and build momentum, these brands mainly choose locations in mid-to-high-end shopping malls in local areas. For example, more than half of Bebe Donut's stores are located in MixC and MixC World; Nunu Donut has entered core commercial districts in Shanghai such as Jing'an Kerry Centre and Grand Gateway Plaza. Songsong Pupu, which focuses on second- and third-tier cities, is also mostly located in top-tier malls such as Wanda Plaza, MixC, and Times Street in various regions.

How long can traffic-fueled donuts sustain their success?

Looking at a longer time horizon, a phenomenal hit product emerges in the baking market every once in a while.

From the "original internet-famous snack" dirty chocolate croissant, to last year's butter rice cake and corn tart, to the recent viral "yoga pants bread", all of these products quickly swept social platforms in a short period of time. Many stores quickly followed the trend to attract a large number of consumers to visit and purchase. However, their popularity came and went quickly: most hit products start to lose their momentum after just a few months.

However, some brands started with a single star product but did not get trapped in it. Instead, they developed more steadily. Take Baosifu as an example: although it became an instant hit with its meat floss mini cakes, it did not stick to only this product. On one hand, it continuously iterated its hit products, launching derivative flavors such as black truffle mini cakes, cocoa mini cakes, and beef mini cakes to consolidate the market advantage of its core product; on the other hand, it continuously expanded its product line, creating many popular items such as taro egg tarts, crispy chocolate puffs, and milk-flavored peach shortbread, forming a rich product matrix.

△ Image source: Screenshot from Xiaohongshu

The egg tart-specialized brand Guanglong Egg Tart King follows the same path: its stores also sell various baked products such as cakes, sandwiches, and milk puddings, expanding consumption scenarios. Egg tarts are more like a traffic attraction rather than the entire business.

In contrast, this new wave of donut specialty stores, despite making many innovations in flavor and appearance, only offer donuts as their sole baked product. In essence, they are only making incremental changes within the same category.

Especially under the current situation where supply and demand are increasingly imbalanced, merchants have to dig into even more niche categories to maintain continuous novelty for consumers. Once other hit products emerge, donut specialty stores with a single-product structure will find it difficult to compete horizontally with new popular categories.

△ Image source: Bebe Donut's Xiaohongshu account

According to observations from Redcanyin, the current popularity of donuts is largely driven by the internet-famous effect. Many consumers said they became interested after seeing recommendations from influencers or posts about queues at the stores. In other words, the current attractiveness of donut specialty stores is more driven by content rather than actual demand. When social topics fade and novelty wears off, store foot traffic is likely to plummet sharply.

This is not surprising in the current consumption environment. As long as a product has a striking appearance and strong topic appeal, it can easily attract public attention in a short period of time. However, the problem is that the attention cycle on social platforms is very short. After one wave of traffic passes, the next wave immediately follows.

Therefore, when the popularity fades, what can stores rely on to maintain repeat purchases is the key challenge that donut brands are facing now.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Redcanyin", written by Lu Ziyan, edited by Wang Xiuqing, and published with authorization from 36Kr.