Making another move with 150 million yuan, Ziyan Food has made a total of over 1.3 billion yuan in external investments in two years. After shutting down more than 1,600 stores, is this marinated snack enterprise seeking self-rescue through cross-sector development?
Why did a braised food company renowned for its Sliced Beef and Ox Tongue in Chili Sauce and Baiwei Chicken invest over 1.3 billion yuan in just two years in fields seemingly not directly related to its main business, such as beef slaughtering, compound seasonings, catering brand incubation, and industrial funds?
Investment Landscape
Ziyan Food, which has made frequent external investments in recent years, has taken another step in its layout.
On the evening of October 8, Ziyan Food issued an announcement that its wholly-owned subsidiary Hainan Zixi Enterprise Management Consulting Co., Ltd., as a limited partner, subscribed 152 million yuan to participate in Sichuan Tiantu Muyun Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership), accounting for 19% of the total subscribed capital contribution of the fund. The total size of the fund is 800 million yuan, with Tiantu Capital as the manager. The funds will mainly be invested in high-quality enterprises in the growth and mature stages of the deep processing industrial chain of agricultural products.
The cooperation between Ziyan Food and Tiantu Capital started as early as two years ago. In April 2024, the two parties signed a strategic cooperation framework, planning to jointly initiate the establishment of a food equity investment fund. By February 2025, Ziyan Food invested 117 million yuan to participate in the establishment of Chongqing Rongchang Tianxiang Venture Capital Fund. The total size of the fund is 300 million yuan, focusing on investing in enterprises in the food and agricultural product processing fields, with Tiantu Capital as the manager. Up to the current 152 million yuan investment and 800 million yuan fund size, it can be seen that both the investment amount of Ziyan Food and the scale of the funds involved are increasing step by step.
At the same time, Ziyan Food's investment behavior is not limited to cooperation with Tiantu. From the beginning of 2026 to now, Ziyan Food has made 4 public investments. In March, Ziyan Food increased the capital of its Chengdu subsidiary by 500 million yuan, and then "Chengdu Ziyan" increased the capital of its wholly-owned grand subsidiary "Nepal Ziyan" by no more than 500 million yuan, which is specially used for the construction of the Nepal production and processing base project. The total investment of the project is 800 million yuan, 300 million yuan has been invested in 2025. The main content is to build a buffalo slaughtering and cooked food factory, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2026.
Also in March this year, Ziyan Food signed an agreement with Angel Yeast to establish a joint venture, in which Ziyan holds 60% of the shares, mainly engaged in compound seasoning and meat product business. In April, Ziyan Food established a joint venture with "Fenniu Catering", planning to incubate multiple chain catering brands with more than 1,000 stores in the next three to five years.
Tracing further back, in 2025, Ziyan Food, through its wholly-owned subsidiary "Wuxi Zixian" as a cornerstone investor, invested 239 million yuan to participate in the subscription of Green Tea Group's Hong Kong stock IPO, becoming the cornerstone investor with the highest investment amount among the 8 cornerstone investors. In 2023, the company made strategic investments in the Chinese-style fried chicken brand "Lao Han Bian Ji" and the Peking duck brand "Jing Cui Xiang"; in 2022, it acquired the Sichuan-style beef with offal brand "Feng Si Niang".
According to incomplete statistics from Neicanjun, in the whole year of 2025, the total amount of external investment clearly disclosed by Ziyan Food is about 656 million yuan. From 2026 to now, the total amount of external investment clearly disclosed has reached 670 million yuan (500 million yuan for the Nepal factory investment, 152 million yuan for participating in the fund managed by Tiantu, and 18 million yuan for establishing a joint venture with Angel Yeast), adding up to more than 1.3 billion yuan.
Its investment tentacles have extended from the main braised food business to multiple fields. Some of these investments are related to the main business, essentially extending upstream along the food processing chain, such as building a beef production base in Nepal and establishing a seasoning company in a joint venture with Angel Yeast. More investment behaviors are obviously "outward", for example, the cornerstone investment in Green Tea Group is a financial securities investment, the joint venture with Fenniu Catering to incubate chain catering brands, and the investment in catering brands such as Feng Si Niang, Lao Han Bian Ji, and Jing Cui Xiang, which belong to the horizontal category expansion outside the main business.
Pressure on Main Business
The intensive investment is closely related to the continuous pressure on Ziyan Food's main business.
In the first half of 2026, Ziyan Food achieved an operating income of 1.663 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.94%, ending the three consecutive years of revenue decline from 2023 to 2025. However, the quality of this recovery is not very good. First, the revenue of the company's signature product Sliced Beef and Ox Tongue in Chili Sauce has not stopped falling. The revenue in the first half of the year fell 4.59% year-on-year to 384 million yuan, while in the whole year of 2025, the revenue of this single product has decreased by 14.12%. Second, while the revenue increased, the net profit dropped sharply by 35.94% to 66.993 million yuan, and the single quarter of the second quarter even lost 16.2954 million yuan, hitting a new low in the same period since its listing.
In the financial report, Ziyan Food attributed the profit decline to the decline in gross profit margin brought by industry competition and raw material costs, as well as the fluctuation of financial asset gains and losses. As mentioned above, Ziyan Food participated in the Green Tea Group IPO as a cornerstone investor in 2025. In the first half of this year, this investment generated a fair value change loss of 40.9169 million yuan.
In fact, excluding these fluctuations in gains and losses, the non-recurring profit and loss net profit of the company in the first half of the year also decreased by 22.03%, indicating that the profitability of the main business is not ideal. In the first half of the year, the gross profit margin of Ziyan Food dropped from 22.24% in the same period of the previous year to 20.42%, a year-on-year decrease of 1.82 percentage points; however, the sales expenses increased significantly by 42.52% to 123 million yuan, and various rigid expenditures continued to squeeze the profit space. The scissors gap between the revenue growth rate and the sales expense growth rate also reflects, to a certain extent, the current situation that the chain braised food business is getting more and more difficult.
Looking back at the past few years, like several other braised food peers, Ziyan Food's performance has been in a declining track. Among them, the revenue peaked at 3.603 billion yuan in 2022, and then declined all the way to 3.238 billion yuan in 2025, with a cumulative decline of more than 10%; the trend of net profit fluctuated even more, experiencing a roller coaster-like ups and downs in the past four years. After a short rebound in 2023, it dropped sharply by 31.84% in 2025, and the decline expanded to 35.94% in the first half of 2026.
Behind the performance fluctuations is the continuous contraction of stores. As the entire chain braised food industry has fallen into a large-scale store closure wave, Ziyan Food is no exception. When the company went public in 2022, it had nearly 5,700 stores across the country, and the total number of stores last disclosed in the 2024 semi-annual report was 6,308. This is the last peak store number officially confirmed by the company, and this data has not been disclosed in the financial report since then.
According to the data of the third-party platform Zhaimen Canyan, as of September 2026, there are about 4,663 operating stores of Ziyan Baiwei Chicken, while the number of operating stores shown in September last year was 5,315, which means that the number of stores has decreased by about 650 in one year, and more than 1,600 stores have been reduced from the peak in June 2024.
Of course, Ziyan's dilemma is not an isolated case, but a microcosm of the growth mode switching of the entire braised food industry. In the first half of 2026, the four listed braised food companies including Juewei Food, Zhou Hei Ya, Huangshanghuang and Ziyan Food achieved a total operating income of about 6.865 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of only about 5.6%; the total attributable net profit was about 379 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of about 18%.
As the traditional growth logic of seizing the market by encrypting stores fails, a large number of inefficient stores have been cleared out in the industry adjustment. Among them, the most representative former "king of 10,000 stores" Juewei Food has closed more than 5,000 stores in the past three years. According to the data of the third-party platform Can Baodian, the overall store closure rate of the braised food category from 2025 to 2026 is 27.9%, which is at a high level in the sub-categories of chain catering.
Under pressure, several listed braised food companies are exploring new growth modes for their main business while seeking new growth curves outside the main business. Ziyan Food's external investment is essentially an attempt to open up new growth channels with supply chain capabilities and capital operations. In terms of volume, its investment amount is not small, and most of them are long-term investments. Whether it can boost the company's performance still needs time to verify.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Food Insider", written by an author who never wastes readers' time, and is authorized to be released by 36Kr.