KK Group takes a stake in Jinlimen, how much of the "affordable Sam's Club" model can it replicate?

More than half of September has passed, and a quiet strategic move has been made in the retail industry.

According to public information on online platforms, KK Group and its founder Wu Yuening have officially invested in the parent company of Jinlimen, holding a total 10% equity stake. Almost at the same time, Jinlimen's first outlet in Zhejiang opened at Xiaoshan MixC in Hangzhou. Half an hour before the official opening, a long queue had already formed at the store entrance.

Capital has placed its bet, and offline stores are seeing explosive popularity. The two events together have once again pushed the label attached to Jinlimen into the spotlight — "the Sam's Club in the snack industry".

Capital players are low-key and prudent about this investment, while the outside world interprets it as a "mutually beneficial arrangement". This naturally leads people to ask,

Why would a trendy retail giant that thrives on "space design and aesthetic appeal" place a bet on a snack store? And as the so-called "affordable Sam's Club", what exactly has Jinlimen learned from Sam's Club?

A budget alternative to Sam's Club with no membership fees required

When talking about Jinlimen, Sam's Club is an unavoidable reference.

The restraint of Sam's Club is well known across the retail sector: it only keeps around 4000 SKUs, selecting the best of the best for each product category. Hit products under the Member's Mark brand such as Swiss rolls and beef rolls have firmly secured its market position. In 2024, the renewal rate of its Premier Members reached 92%, its annual sales exceeded 140 billion yuan, and the number of paid members surpassed 10.7 million.

For consumers, the most valuable part of Sam's Club is not its large product packaging, but the "worry-free shopping experience" it offers.

It has already filtered out the trouble of making difficult choices for consumers before the products are even placed on the shelves.

What Jinlimen has borrowed is exactly this "curated hit products" logic, as well as the in-store scenario design.

However, it has made a small adjustment: it splits Sam's Club's hit products into smaller specifications with lower price points. Small families and single consumers

can finish the products in one go without any waste.

Its first store in Nanjing offers more than 160 SKUs; its first store in Hangzhou has nearly 200 SKUs. Most of the products are private label, with the mainstream price range falling between 10 yuan and 25 yuan.

As a result, on social platforms, some people have given it a nickname: "loose-packaged Sam's Club".

Its packaging is smaller, its unit price is lower, and customers do not need to pay hundreds of yuan in membership fees before entering the store.

However, without the stable revenue base brought by membership fees, Jinlimen naturally has to adopt a different accounting model for its business.

The gross profit margin of traditional bulk snack retail is around 15%, while that of fresh snacks can reach 30% to 42%. Sam's Club builds its moat with "membership fees plus product price difference", while Jinlimen supports its single-store profit model with a higher gross profit margin structure and higher offline sales per unit area.

Although the two paths are different, they eventually lead to the same goal: to get consumers to willingly return to the store again and again with well-selected products and a lively, approachable atmosphere.

Optimize in-store flow internally, compete for store locations externally?

This popularity was first clearly demonstrated in physical stores.

The first store in Nanjing exceeded 1 million yuan in sales within 3 days of opening, and the passenger flow 10 days later was more than 5 times that of the first day. "Visiting Jinlimen" once became a viral check-in trend on social platforms.

More than a month after the first store opened at Buji MixC in Shenzhen, a queue as long as 100 meters still stretched from the escalator entrance all the way to the subway exit, and canned milk tea with a shelf life of only one day was limited to two bottles per customer.

Less than an hour after the first store in Hangzhou opened, many popular hit products had already been restocked for several rounds...

Behind the bustling scene is a meticulous accounting system embedded in the in-store flow design.

Take the first store in Nanjing as an example: the most prominent position at the entrance is occupied by good-looking, instantly satisfying drinks, baked goods and fresh marinated snacks. The checkout counter is placed at the deepest part of the store. Shelf-stable dried fruits and freeze-dried products are placed on the only path leading to the inner area of the store.

To put it simply: high-frequency fresh food products are responsible for "drawing customers in", while the shelf-stable products in the deep area of the store are responsible for "increasing the average customer spend".

Some surveys have found that in a store with nearly 140 SKUs, short-shelf-life products with a shelf life of only 1 to 5 days account for nearly half, 46.1% of the total SKUs, but contribute more than 60% of the total sales.

The way shelves are arranged is not a matter of aesthetic preference. Essentially, it is a profit statement in itself.

If in-store flow optimization is a meticulous internal task, site selection is a high-stakes game of heavy asset investment on the external side.

The lifespan of short-shelf-life products is calculated in hours and days. Unsold products directly become losses. As a result, stores have to be located in areas with the densest foot traffic.

Therefore, most of Jinlimen's new stores are located in China Resources MixC malls and other commercial projects under China Resources. The Buji MixC store in Shenzhen and the Xiaoshan MixC store in Hangzhou are both on the B1 floor; the first store in Nanjing is on the B1 floor of IFCX Newli Plaza in Xinjiekou, with direct access to the subway station.

However, high-quality store locations in core business districts have always been scarce.

The player that can scale up quickly will seize the initiative in the subsequent expansion of store networks. Site selection has thus become the most critical deciding factor in the second half of the fresh snack industry.

What do the trendy retail giant and the dark horse snack brand each get from this partnership?

When KK Group entered the market, the two parties did not disclose all the details of the deal.

But from an external perspective, several clear industrial logics have already emerged.

The first point is channel complementarity.

KK Group's offline presence has covered 31 provinces, more than 200 key cities across China, as well as multiple overseas countries, operating more than 1340 stores in core business districts.

Jinlimen is accelerating its national expansion, with most of its new stores closely connected to commercial projects under China Resources and other groups. It has also previously signaled its plan to open new stores in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou through recruitment of senior store managers.

With one party having a mature commercial property network and the other having strong expansion ambition, there is huge room for imagination in subsequent site selection cooperation.

The second point is consistent aesthetic orientation.

Design agency ABCD disclosed in the case section of its official website that it is the designer behind Jinlimen's brand image. The contrasting red and blue color scheme is direct and eye-catching. The brand logo integrates the dual imagery of "gate" and "store", and the transparent packaging directly highlights the "fresh" attribute of the products on the shelves. Bananain is also one of the clients that this agency has cooperated with.

On its official website, KK Group summarizes Generation Z as a group that holds the view that "aesthetic is justice, social interaction is currency, and individuality is motivation", and takes "aesthetics + technology" as its dual development track.

One party is good at taking design as a communication language, while the other excels at creating the best in-store space experience. The two parties are highly aligned in capturing the mindshare of young consumers.

The third point is supply chain and chain operation expertise.

Before expanding out of its home market in Hunan, Jinlimen had been polishing its business model in the local market for many years.

However, short-shelf-life food has strict physical transportation radius limits. To expand across regions, the supply chain must keep up. Fortunately, China's cold chain logistics infrastructure is now mature, which has created objective conditions for the national expansion of the short-shelf-life food business.

From store preparation to standardized operation, the chain operation expertise that KK Group has accumulated over more than ten years can perfectly fill the gap for Jinlimen.

Of course, the biggest attraction of this deal is the explosive dividend of the track itself.

The fresh snack market is in a period of rapid growth. Multiple institutions hold optimistic expectations for its long-term market ceiling, expecting the sector to reach a scale of 1000 stores in the next three to five years.

In terms of capital structure, this 10% minority stake with a total subscribed capital of 2.222 million yuan does not involve any change of control. The subscribed amount is also not equal to the actual final investment.

However, in the current era of physical retail transformation, the move of a trendy retail giant turning its attention to the fresh snack sector is in itself a firm positive signal.

As for the deeper strategic intentions, time will tell.

Thoughts from Jutou Finance: Don't rush to call it the "Sam's Club in the snack industry" just yet

The name "Sam's Club" has saved Jinlimen a huge amount of explanation costs, but it also quietly brought a measuring ruler along with it.

Sam's Club has driven a number of mature factories with high-standard short-shelf-life food production capabilities. Now when many fresh snack brands select suppliers, they will prioritize checking whether the suppliers have previously supplied products to Sam's Club or Freshippo.

The path blazed by pioneers allows latecomers to move faster; and those who move faster need to present their own clear and complete answer sheet.

Relevant regulations are also evolving in a similar direction. The Food Label Supervision and Administration Measures will come into effect on March 16, 2027, putting forward clearer requirements for information such as producer details on pre-packaged food labels.

Information such as who the producer is and how the product is made will be presented to consumers more clearly through labels. For the entire fresh snack industry, the promise of "freshness" will need more verifiable facts to support it in the future.

There is another thought-provoking detail. On the streets of Changsha, woven bags with contrasting red and blue colors were once seen everywhere; among posts about "Changsha Jinlimen" on social platforms, 36.8% of them are strongly related to tourism, check-in activities, and souvenir purchases.

A customer who once traveled to Changsha said that she tried Jinlimen's products during the trip and found them very delicious, but could not take them away due to their short shelf life. It was not until the first store opened in Hangzhou that she finally got the "snack freedom" at her doorstep. Souvenirs carry the unique vibe of a city, but short-shelf-life snacks cannot be taken away over long distances, so the stores have to "chase after consumers" and open locations closer to them.

The 10% equity stake is not a major move at the capital level, but it does combine the strengths of the two enterprises: one is good at attracting customers into the store, and the other can drive continuous repurchase from customers.

External attractiveness determines whether customers will push the door open for the first time, while long-term consistent quality and trust are what determine whether they will come back again later. When people no longer need to use other brands' names to introduce Jinlimen one day, the story of "the Sam's Club in the snack industry" can be regarded as truly completed.

Partial references:

1. Jinlimen Receives Equity Investment from KK Group and Its Founder Wu Yuening

2. Queuing for 100 Meters, Young People Are Crazy About the "Loose-packaged Sam's Club"

3. "Little Sam's Club" Becomes the New Hit in Malls, Some Stores Make 6 Million Yuan in One Month, Industry Giants Are Betting Heavily on the Track

4. MixC Malls Are Almost Turning Into Exclusive Malls for Jinlimen

5. Membership Fee Revenue Grows by 40%, Online Sales Account for Over 50%, Decoding Sam's Club Stores in China

This article is from the WeChat official account "Jutou Finance" (ID: jutoucaijing), written by Jutou Editorial Committee, and authorized for release by 36Kr.