Expanding to 7 cities within 60 days, Alibaba restarts Taoxianda, and the fierce competition in the front-warehouse track has reignited.

Alibaba has relaunched Taoxian Da, adding more fuel to the fiercely competitive instant retail battlefield.

At present, Taoxian Da is accelerating the opening of warehouses in cities including Hefei, Nanjing and Hangzhou. A site stationmaster frankly told Tech Planet that the most tricky problem at the moment is the shortage of staff, especially a severe shortage of delivery riders.

On the other side, as Xiaohu Supermarket under Meituan shifts to direct operation in many cities, some former service providers of Xiaohu Supermarket have joined the Taoxian Da project at the end of August this year.

From the overall layout of Alibaba Group, Taoxian Da is now positioned as a value-for-money supermarket under Freshippo, and is pushing forward 24-hour delivery. Alibaba has long lacked a product that can directly compete against Xiaohu Supermarket. After the takeaway war, whether it is to enrich the supply side of Taobao Flash Purchase or seize the user mindshare of the trillion-yuan instant retail market, the urgency has further increased.

Over the past year, from Taobao convenience stores, to multiple Freshippo stores closing and converting to front warehouses, to the relaunch of Taoxian Da at the end of September, with multiple business formats advancing in parallel, Alibaba is "going all out" on the instant retail track.

Aggressive expansion in 7 cities within 60 days, poaching talents from Xiaohu Supermarket, Alibaba relaunches Taoxian Da

In mid-September, Taoxian Da, positioned as a value-for-money supermarket under Freshippo, quickly and densely covered all communities in Hefei.

In terms of warehouse opening speed, Taoxian Da is extremely aggressive. After opening 6 front warehouses at one time in Hefei, Taoxian Da took this as a starting point to replicate its model outward, and successively entered Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou in about a month and a half. A service provider revealed to Tech Planet that Taoxian Da will enter Ningbo, Changzhou and Wuxi next, and there are more than 33 warehouses across the country at present.

In Hefei, the entry traffic position given to Taoxian Da by Taobao Flash Purchase under Alibaba is quite prominent. This round of expansion is also concentrated in East China, where Freshippo has the most advantages.

Note: "Taoxian Da" on the homepage of Taobao Flash Purchase in Hefei.

Behind the aggressive 60-day expansion, Alibaba has actually planned for a long time internally. In March this year, according to reports from multiple media outlets including Blue Whale News, Wang Zhiqiang, former vice president of Kuaishou, officially joined Freshippo in June, in charge of innovative projects and reporting directly to Yan Xiaolei (alias: Baihe), CEO of Freshippo.

The most well-known experience of Wang Zhiqiang to the public is that he once served as the head of the product department of Meituan Grocery (the predecessor of Xiaohu Supermarket). This experience gives him direct insight into the product operation logic of the front warehouse model, and is regarded by the public as Alibaba's intention to poach him to compete against Xiaohu Supermarket.

A former Freshippo employee also revealed to Tech Planet that Taoxian Da is exactly classified as an innovative project within Freshippo, operated by teams from Freshippo front warehouses and part of the Super Box Calculation NB team, reusing Freshippo's warehouse distribution assets and equipment to reduce costs.

Recently, Alibaba continued to transfer manpower to Taoxian Da. Zhang Dongzheng, former procurement head of Super Box Calculation NB, the hard discount format under Freshippo, has been transferred to the post of product head of Taoxian Da. From his past experience, Zhang Dongzheng can directly apply the product selection and supply chain experience accumulated by Super Box Calculation NB in the mass consumer market to the front warehouse model of Taoxian Da.

As previously reported by Ebrun, the front warehouse business is a key direction of Alibaba's E-Commerce Business Group, and Jiang Fan, CEO of the group, holds meetings with the Freshippo (Taoxian Da) front warehouse team almost every month to push forward the business.

In terms of positioning, Taoxian Da is positioned between Freshippo and Super Box Calculation NB, focusing on online value-for-money products in front warehouses. A fresh e-commerce practitioner told Tech Planet that Xiaohu has taken the lead in the front warehouse industry, and Alibaba's response has been somewhat slow. In Freshippo's current product system, although Super Box Calculation NB also targets the mass market, it has two shortcomings: first, the product portfolio is not large enough, with less than 2000 SKUs, focusing on high-frequency rigid demands; second, it adopts the offline store model.

The above practitioner said that Super Box Calculation NB currently follows the route of attracting traffic with fresh products and making profits from standard products, and the offline model is heavy; profits can only be sustained when the flow of people brought by fresh product drainage is far greater than the number of people who buy standard products.

In comparison, Taoxian Da has more than 7000 SKUs, most of which are third-party standard products, and it has been directly competing against Xiaohu Supermarket from the very beginning.

At present, Meituan Xiaohu Supermarket has more than 2000 front warehouses, while Alibaba's self-operated fresh food distribution has long relied on the integrated store-warehouse model of Freshippo and the support of Super Box Calculation NB stores, and has always lacked a widely covered self-operated warehouse network dedicated to fast delivery of family fresh food and groceries. What Taoxian Da needs to make up for is exactly this structural gap.

This also means that Taoxian Da is still in the early expansion stage of seizing the time window: first build up the warehouse network density and product supply, and whether the order density of a single warehouse can support the profit model requires longer-term verification.

This is already the third time that Alibaba has relaunched Taoxian Da. Previously, Taoxian Da successively undertook businesses such as online fulfillment for supermarkets including RT-Mart and community group buying. Now it returns in the front warehouse model and becomes a participant in Alibaba's instant retail war.

Competing in night delivery, seizing the market with low prices, opening warehouses adjacent to Freshippo

Looking at the product portfolio specifically, taking milk and baked products as examples, searching on Taoxian Da shows that Taoxian Da currently has no self-operated products at all, while most of Freshippo's products are self-operated. This means that Taoxian Da's low prices come more from third-party standard products and compressed distribution costs, rather than supply chain efficiency brought by private labels.

Note: Taoxian Da page (left), Freshippo page (right).

By comparison, private labels are the collective main attack direction of brands represented by Freshippo. The 2026 China Shopper Report released by Bain and Numerator shows that Sam's Club's private label accounted for about 38% in 2025. However, Sam's total number of SKUs is extremely small, usually maintained at about 4000, and the "presence" and single product efficiency of private labels in the minimalist product portfolio are actually very high. Freshippo's private label accounts for about 35%-40%.

Meituan has not publicly disclosed relevant data. In the Q1 earnings call this year, Meituan's management said that private labels have occupied an increasingly high share of sales.

The statistical caliber of Dingdong Maicai is different. As of June 2026, its official disclosed "private label penetration rate" reached 68.5%, but the "penetration rate" here refers to the breadth of private labels reaching users.

At present, Taoxian Da shares the supply chain with Freshippo, and the warehouse location is also adjacent to Freshippo's front warehouses. Many users found after placing orders that the shipping location of Taoxian Da's orders is the same place as that of Freshippo's front warehouses.

However, a site employee explained to Tech Planet that Taoxian Da's warehouses are only close to Freshippo's, and the quality of goods from the large warehouses is different. "It depends on the region. Only overlapping fresh products come from the same large warehouse, and the high-quality products screened out first are definitely given to Freshippo. Moreover, Freshippo has many self-operated products, and its supplier system is quite different from that of Taoxian Da." According to the employee, Freshippo itself wants to spin off part of the general products to gradually increase the proportion of private labels.

But if Taoxian Da wants to directly compete against Xiaohu Supermarket, it needs sufficient density to dilute costs and finally realize a profitable model. In particular, in the scuffle of front warehouses over the past year, giants have built barriers with a scale of thousands of warehouses. It remains to be seen what latecomers can rely on to increase the order density of a single warehouse.

A Taoxian Da site stationmaster calculated an account for Tech Planet: a rider earns 5 yuan per order, and the salary is higher than that of Freshippo's riders. At present, there are 10 delivery staff at one site, with an average of 60 to 70 orders per person per day, and about 1000 orders per day in total. The current order peak is mainly concentrated from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m.

According to the stationmaster, there are not many night delivery orders, and only one or two people are enough at the site. "Two people together run less than 10 orders." In his opinion, it makes little sense to compete for 24-hour delivery.

There is no uniform break-even point for front warehouses, which highly depends on the warehouse size, customer unit price, gross profit margin and fulfillment cost structure. According to public data, the average daily order volume of new warehouses of Dingdong Maicai this year generally exceeds 1000 orders, and the first site in Yancheng exceeded 2800 orders on the first day; Xiaohu Supermarket and Pupu Supermarket with larger warehouse types have higher average daily order volume.

Note: The billing rules of Taoxian Da.

In addition to competing for delivery duration, Taoxian Da has a lower delivery threshold. The basic delivery fee of the Taoxian Da App is 3 yuan, and users can get free basic delivery when the order amount reaches 29 yuan. In contrast, the free delivery threshold of the own Apps of platforms such as Freshippo, Xiaohu Supermarket and Dingdong Maicai usually ranges from 35 yuan to 39 yuan, and the basic delivery fee ranges from 5 to 6 yuan.

A Taoxian Da supplier told Tech Planet that some products were shared in the initial stage of Taoxian Da's launch, and they are gradually being distinguished, after all, the customer groups they face are different. The current product selection logic is to transplant Freshippo's product selection, keep the best-selling products, replace the poor-selling ones with new products. Taoxian Da generally needs affordable and more down-to-earth products.

Alibaba goes all out for front warehouses

From the perspective of Freshippo's internal system, being positioned under Freshippo can help Taoxian Da quickly build user mindshare; at present, Taoxian Da's member operation system is also similar to that of Freshippo, focusing on promoting quarterly cards and annual cards, with rights and interests including strategies such as the free vegetable collection that Freshippo used to launch.

Before Taoxian Da, Freshippo also increased its investment in front warehouses in the second half of this year. However, Freshippo's front warehouses are extended from the large store system of Freshippo, and its products and pricing are naturally restricted by Freshippo's positioning. In the future, if Freshippo sticks to the mid-to-high-end fresh food market and existing users, its SKUs and price bands will move towards the quality direction, and Taoxian Da will take over mass users and benchmark against Xiaohu Supermarket, so the two cover different crowds.

But at the same time, whether Taoxian Da will dilute Freshippo's brand or member system is also a question that needs to be answered.

After Freshippo accessed Taobao Flash Purchase and increased its investment in front warehouses, more and more Freshippo members complained on social platforms. A user told Tech Planet that Taoxian Da and Freshippo's front warehouses are the same, daily fresh food and groceries are almost identical, but some products are 2 yuan more expensive on Freshippo than on Taoxian Da; there is no difference in fruits, and the price is more appropriate, but users cannot enjoy Freshippo's four-day fresh food refund mechanism. The user said that he has decided not to renew the Freshippo membership after expiration.

If Taoxian Da's scale continues to expand, this internal tension of competing with its own business may only become stronger. What role Freshippo's front warehouses play in this system also remains a question mark.

For Alibaba Group, Taoxian Da's most important mission remains the instant retail market. It is a layout to expand the self-operated supply of non-food instant retail, cooperate with Taobao Flash Purchase to win more home delivery orders and market share.

Recently, the non-food business of Taobao Flash Purchase has also welcomed a new leader. According to Ebrun, Wang Tingxiang, former head of the Apparel Development Department of Taobao and Tmall Group, has been transferred to Taobao Flash Purchase as the head of the non-food business of the Instant Retail Department, and the former head Hu Qiugen has been transferred to Alibaba Health. Wang Tingxiang has successively been in charge of businesses including Taoxian Da, Taocai Cai, Taobao Guangguang and the Apparel Development Department.

The relaunch of Taoxian Da in the self-operated front warehouse model is a step for Alibaba to make up for its shortcomings in self-operated fresh food front warehouses. This step did not come early. The current aggressive expansion has only kicked off the prelude, and the real test will come next year.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Tech Planet" (ID: tech618), author: Lin Jing, published with authorization from 36Kr.