The ice cream that Luo Yonghao once described as unpalatable has raised financing.

The ice cream that Luo Yonghao described as "unpalatable" has completed a financing round.

On October 30, Mr. Savage, the ice cream brand established 15 years ago, announced the completion of its first round of financing, with Black Ant Capital participating in the investment. Neither the financing amount nor the valuation has been disclosed. This brand that sells ice cream for 28 to 38 yuan per serving now has more than 1,800 active operating stores. When it began to test the franchise model at the end of 2023, it only had around 100 stores. In less than three years, the number of its stores has expanded by more than ten times.

Founder Cui Jianwei once publicly questioned the bubble in consumer investment. Back in August this year, he told Daily People that the company had never accepted external investment. Now, just over two months later, the capital has been in place.

Image source: Qichacha

"The Right Timing"

Cui Jianwei is no stranger to the capital market. On the contrary, he himself has a background as an investor.

This native of Shanxi graduated from the MBA program of Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, and once worked at an Italian investment institution for four years. During that period, he participated in the investment of an Italian-style ice cream enterprise, and gradually developed an interest in the ice cream industry. Later, he simply quit his job and started his own ice cream business.

In 2011, he opened his first ice cream store "Fresh Fruit Club" in Wudaokou, Beijing. When starting his business, he also took a public alias for himself — "Cui Jianwei", hoping that he could "gradually make achievements". In 2015, he began to switch to making fresh Italian-style ice cream and founded "Savage Pasture", and did not rename the brand to "Mr. Savage" until 2024.

The character meaning "gradual" in his alias perfectly fits the pace of his entrepreneurship.

For more than ten years after starting the business, the number of Mr. Savage's stores has always been less than 100. In order to ensure high-quality milk sources, Cui Jianwei even raised cattle and built pastures by himself. He reinvested all the profits he made, and the company did not distribute dividends for ten years at one point.

He was in no hurry to open stores, nor was he in a hurry to seek financing.

In August this year, Cui Jianwei revealed in an interview with Daily People that many investment institutions had approached him in the early years, but he always remained alert to the capital frenzy in the new consumption sector. In particular, those stories that "a single store is valued at 100 million yuan" are, in his view, long against common business sense, but just bubbles blown together by investors and entrepreneurs.

However, he does not reject financing entirely.

In an interview with FoodTalks in September 2025, his attitude towards financing was "not rejecting, not refusing, not taking the initiative"; by August this year, he clearly stated: "We are not not considering it, but we need to wait for the right timing."

The "right timing" Cui Jianwei waited for may lie in the rapid expansion of Mr. Savage in the past two years.

At the end of 2023, Mr. Savage began to try the franchise model, and fully opened up the franchise system in 2024. After more than ten years of accumulation in products and supply chain, this business finally ushered in the opportunity for large-scale expansion.

At the same time, the cost of opening stores is also decreasing. In the early stage, a set of imported ice cream equipment cost about 500,000 yuan, but now domestic equipment has reduced the price to 50,000 to 60,000 yuan, greatly lowering the threshold for opening new stores.

According to data from Zhai Men Can Yan, Mr. Savage opened 244 new stores in 2024 and 916 new stores in 2025. By October this year, the latest disclosed number of active operating stores has exceeded 1,800.

However, as the number of stores grows from 100 to 1,000, the difficulty of supply chain and franchise management also increases. For this round of financing, Mr. Savage plans to use the funds mainly for supply chain construction, brand operation, store expansion, and exploration of overseas business models.

The brand platform company of Mr. Savage has recently undergone equity changes, with its registered capital increasing from 10 million yuan to more than 10.55 million yuan, and two new shareholders introduced. Among them, Xiamen Yidaixing, which is associated with Black Ant Capital, holds 3.9145% of the shares, and Beyond Aquarius Hong Kong Co., Ltd. holds 3.4539%, with a total shareholding of about 7.37%.

Mr. Savage said that it will remain independently operated after the financing.

Therefore, this round of financing is not so much a change of Cui Jianwei's view on capital, as that Mr. Savage has reached another stage of development. In the past, he had to consider how to keep a single store profitable; now, the more important thing is to make sure that thousands of stores can all run good businesses.

After being named by Luo Yonghao,

What did Mr. Savage do right?

On September 12, 2026, Luo Yonghao left a bad review for a catering brand on Weibo again.

This time it was Mr. Savage's turn.

Luo Yonghao said he tried this suddenly popular ice cream brand at the airport and found the taste very mediocre, "considering the price, it can even be described as unpalatable". He added that he thought it was much more unpalatable than Chicecream, and he missed Chicecream very much.

But Mr. Savage did not pick a fight. In response to netizens' inquiries, the brand customer service only said that it would record and feedback the opinions. It was not until September 16 that the official account of Mr. Savage released a post, saying that it would carefully listen to consumers' opinions, and at the same time previewed the ice cream harvest festival, without confronting Luo Yonghao head-on.

This forms a contrast with the multiple public confrontations between Xibei founder Jia Guolong and Luo Yonghao last year. However, compared with the controversy over pre-made dishes, "unpalatable" is more of a subjective judgment of personal taste, and there is no need for Mr. Savage to argue with consumers over who is right or wrong.

This silence unexpectedly brought a lot of attention to Mr. Savage. The day after Luo Yonghao posted the comment, Mr. Savage's video account gained nearly 30,000 new followers in a single day, and the topic "Mr. Savage's low-key handling" even topped the hot search list. However, hot search is just hot search, and the increase in followers does not mean the growth of sales.

In fact, what is really worth discussing in Luo Yonghao's bad review is the phrase "considering the price".

Is a serving of ice cream priced at 28 to 38 yuan really expensive?

Cui Jianwei has his own calculation logic. He once said that a serving of traditional Gelato is about 80 grams, priced at 30 to 40 yuan, while Mr. Savage's ice cream starts at 130 grams for 28 yuan, which is actually cheaper calculated by weight.

But consumers may not calculate it this way. 28 yuan can buy two or three cups of cheap milk tea, or several ordinary ice cream bars. Whether it is worth the price depends on the taste and experience that customers pursue.

Chicecream, mentioned by Luo Yonghao, once became popular with high-priced ice cream bars, but later fell into operational difficulties. Compared with Chicecream, which mainly sells pre-packaged ice cream bars, Mr. Savage chose offline fresh-made ice cream, hoping to support the high price with fresh taste and in-store experience.

However, the positioning of "fresh-made" once also made Mr. Savage fall into controversy.

In 2025, some consumers found that the stores used frozen milk slurry raw material packages, and questioned the brand's publicity of "made fresh on the same day". Cui Jianwei later explained that the brand adopts the model of pre-processing raw materials in the central factory and completing the final production in the stores. In other words, the ice cream is made fresh on the same day, which does not mean that raw materials such as milk slurry are also produced on the same day.

At the end of the day, in the face of Luo Yonghao's comment of "unpalatable", Mr. Savage can choose not to argue. But if it sells at a high price, it has to make consumers feel it is worth it; if it opens a large number of stores, it also has to make sure franchisees can make money. Compared with a single hot search, these are the questions the brand needs to answer more urgently.

What did Black Ant Capital see in it?

This round of financing is also noteworthy because investment in the consumer track is no longer as bustling as it was in previous years.

According to incomplete statistics from iBrandi, in the first half of 2022, 366 financing deals took place in the new consumption sector, with the total amount exceeding 25 billion yuan; in the same period of 2025, the number dropped to 44 deals, with a total amount of nearly 2.8 billion yuan. By the first half of 2026, although the number rebounded to 63 deals with a total amount of about 5.356 billion yuan, 28 of them flowed into AI intelligent consumption, and traditional consumer sectors including food, beverages, beauty and personal care, and clothing only had 20 deals in total.

Investors are becoming more and more cautious in selecting consumer projects.

Black Ant Capital, which made the investment this time, is an investment institution that has been deeply engaged in the consumer sector for many years.

Founded in 2016, Black Ant Capital has invested in Pop Mart, Laofeng Gold, Heytea, Genki Forest, Mingmang Henmang, as well as enterprises including Giant Bio, British folding bicycle brand Brompton, and smart cycling brand TENWAYS.

From milk tea and snacks to gold and trendy toys, and even sports equipment, these seemingly unrelated businesses share similar investment logic behind them.

He Yu once said in an exclusive interview with Zhenghedao that Black Ant Capital mainly focuses on two types of opportunities: one is ultimate experience, and the other is ultimate efficiency.

The former, such as Pop Mart and Laofeng Gold, makes consumers willing to pay higher prices through product design, culture and brand value; the latter, such as Mingmang Henmang, sells snacks at lower prices relying on large-scale procurement and supply chain integration.

Mr. Savage just wants to combine the two.

In April this year, Mr. Savage further put forward the concept of "Oriental Gelato", combining Italian ice cream technology with Chinese ingredients such as Wuchang rice and Hengxian jasmine, and also released the draft of enterprise standards for fresh-made ice cream.

On the one hand, there are characteristic flavors such as Wuchang rice and pistachio, as well as consumption experience brought by in-store tasting and on-site production; on the other hand, unified milk slurry supply, cold chain distribution and standardized equipment make the single-store model replicable across the country.

Cui Jianwei once described his business as "Heytea at the front end, Mixue Bingcheng at the back end". He wants to make consumers willing to pay more for the products, and control costs through supply chain and large-scale operation.

He Yu, Managing Partner of Black Ant Capital, also said that he is optimistic about Mr. Savage's ability to create new growth space in a mature or even under-pressure market through product and in-store experience innovation.

However, after Mr. Savage made Gelato popular, more and more competitors have emerged.

This year, Heytea launched "Hey Gelato", Bawangchaji launched "Cha Gelato", and even the coffee brand Lavazza has started to sell Gelato. Some products are priced at less than 20 yuan, which has a price advantage compared with Mr. Savage's regular price of 28 to 38 yuan.

For these tea brands, selling ice cream does not need to start from scratch. Their existing stores, customer flow and membership system can all be used to promote new products. But Mr. Savage needs to make consumers willing to spend more money to visit a dedicated ice cream store. The ice cream business also has peak and off-seasons: there are long queues in summer, but the same customer flow cannot be maintained in winter.

For Mr. Savage, which mainly adopts the franchise model, as the number of stores increases, how to make franchisees keep making money is also very important. In mid-October 2026, a video of a former franchisee of Mr. Savage at Hangzhou Joy City smashing the facilities of his own store spread on the Internet. According to a source cited by Finance Network, this was caused by the fact that the shopping mall did not renew the contract with the former franchisee after the contract expired, and the specific cause of the dispute remains to be verified.

At the same time, Mr. Savage has also begun to seek opportunities overseas. In August this year, the brand opened its first store in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, and it had already entered the Singapore market before. However, the consumption habits and operating costs in different markets are different, and whether this model can continue to succeed overseas remains to be tested.

From the perspective of the entire consumer investment market, this round of financing of Mr. Savage also reflects that capital's focus on consumer brands is changing.

In the past, when the new consumption sector was at its most bustling, store opening speed and growth expectations were often enough to support high valuations. After a round of adjustment, investors pay more attention to whether the product is competitive, whether the stores can make profits, and whether the enterprise has the ability to operate in the long term.

Mr. Savage spent more than ten years polishing its products, and opened more than 1,000 stores in less than three years. Now that Black Ant Capital has chosen to enter the market, what it values may not only be the current popularity of Gelato, but also whether this company can turn the seemingly small ice cream business into a truly long-term and sustainable chain brand.

Conclusion

Without any financing for 15 years, Cui Jianwei turned a small ice cream shop into a chain brand with more than 1,800 stores. Now, capital has finally entered the market.

Luo Yonghao thinks its ice cream is "unpalatable", but investors are willing to pay for it. However, compared with whether capital is optimistic about it, whether consumers are willing to repeatedly buy the 28-yuan ice cream is the most important test for Mr. Savage.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital), written by Li Bingzhi, and published with authorization from 36Kr.