A Conversation with Mingming Henmang: Extreme Efficiency and AI Mastery Are the Decisive Factors in Retail Today | Gaorong Future

Over the past year, Mingming Henmang Group has indeed been "very busy."

In March 2024, at the Wanwu Growth 2024 Annual Partner Conference held in Beijing, the two brands — Busy Snacks (零食很忙) and Zhao Yiming Snacks (赵一鸣零食) — made their first public appearance following their merger. In June, the group officially changed its name to Mingming Henmang Group and announced that its total number of stores nationwide had surpassed 10,000, becoming China's first snack retail chain to reach the 10,000-store milestone. In July, the group announced Jay Chou as its brand ambassador — from a small snack shop founded in Changsha, Hunan, to landing Jay Chou as its spokesperson: "After thousands of miles of mountains and rivers, we finally meet." In the second half of the year, innovative super stores like "Super Busy Snacks," "Big Snacks," "Spicy Snacks," and "Zhao Yiming Snack Research Institute," along with the ongoing New Year's goods festival, continued to capture consumers' attention.

When Gaorong Ventures co-led the first funding round for Busy Snacks in 2021, the company had 450 stores and had just begun its national expansion. At the time, Rui Han of Gaorong Ventures noted that "Busy Snacks possesses not only brand value, but more importantly, has built an entire infrastructure for snack consumption." In 2022, Gaorong Ventures continued to support the company in another funding round.

Recently, in Changsha — a city that has produced numerous phenomenon-level consumer brands — we sat down with Sun Hao, CIO of Mingming Henmang Group, to discuss what lies behind the sustainable growth of the "discount snack" retail model: how Mingming Henmang built an extremely efficient infrastructure, and how it leverages digitalization and AI technology as powerful tools to drive standardized store operations and high-speed supply chain performance.

The following is Sun Hao's account (edited for clarity):

Looking back at 2024, here are some latest figures: As of November 2024, Mingming Henmang Group's store count exceeded 14,000; when Busy Snacks and Zhao Yiming Snacks merged in November 2023, their combined total was fewer than 7,000 stores — meaning store numbers doubled in just one year.

In 2024, while national store sales scale grew substantially, total membership exceeded 150 million, and total SKUs surpassed 3,000.

Why has Mingming Henmang achieved such surprising growth velocity?

Going back to the beginning, Mingming Henmang was originally a business model innovation. We took the snack category out of supermarkets and built a standalone offering to meet consumer demand for both extensive variety and extreme value-for-money in snack purchases.

Walk into a Busy Snacks store, and you'll see how the "discount snack" format enables one-stop shopping across thousands of SKUs, with new products introduced weekly. The store design creates an immersive experience where consumers can get instant gratification, and product prices are exceptionally competitive.

Behind this model innovation, cost and efficiency are the killer apps. Through direct supply chain sourcing, the group achieves lower procurement prices and higher inventory turnover efficiency, allowing consumers to enjoy better products and services at lower prices.

Mingming Henmang's "growth flywheel" began to spin: as inventory turnover efficiency improved, supply chain costs dropped further, enabling even lower prices on the same products, which drove greater consumer popularity, which in turn fueled sales scale growth, which further compressed procurement costs. Currently, Mingming Henmang's average warehouse inventory turnover cycle is around 6 days — unimaginable for many retail enterprises.

The rapid growth of both brands' store counts in recent years has given consumers the impression that they're "blooming everywhere." When store density in a given city reaches a critical point, it triggers a qualitative leap in growth, with the potential to explode sales locally. For example, Changsha alone has over 600 Busy Snacks stores, and Zhao Yiming Snacks has extremely high density in Guangdong.

Sufficiently high urban store density can capture consumer mindshare. When consumers see stores everywhere, they'll naturally want to browse inside. Once they do, they discover rich product variety, great taste, quality assurance, and low prices — which drives repeat purchases.

Some believe we're in an era of "consumption downgrading," but in reality consumers have simply become more rational. If the same products can be offered at lower prices, with as much one-stop convenience as possible, consumers will "vote with their feet."

Behind the success of this growth model lies Mingming Henmang's strategy of "building high walls and storing ample grain." On one hand, we've established a complete standardized management system and a value-chain distribution system with upstream and downstream partners. On the other hand, we believe that extreme operational capability is the decisive factor in retail, so we relentlessly pursue efficiency gains in every single link.

Especially given the current state of intense industry competition,阶段性差异化无法构建持续的护城河 — whoever can truly achieve extreme operational efficiency has the opportunity to secure long-term victory.

For example, in standardized store operations, the group has invested substantial resources to ensure consistency in display, customer service, and other standards across all stores. Customers walking into any store can expect good service and experience.

To guarantee the implementation of standardization, the company conducts ongoing on-site and remote online store inspections. After each inspection, stores are scored on their standardization performance. Outstanding stores receive rewards; underperforming ones are urged to improve or provided with training to continuously elevate store management. Each store undergoes an average of 6-8 remote video inspections and 1-2 on-site inspections per month.

On product selection, dozens of new items are introduced nationwide each month, with a corresponding number delisted. Before any new product officially goes on sale, it must pass through six screening stages: "product center tasting — consumer tasting — online documentation review — store trial sales — laboratory testing — factory audit."

On warehousing and logistics, the group has currently established 33 distribution centers nationwide, with millions of cases of goods flowing through these centers daily.

We believe digitalization is a critical enabler of efficient operations. In 2024, the retail digital business system fully developed by Mingming Henmang's digital team officially launched, achieving full-process digital management across the entire business, covering front-end member management, store management, and point-of-sale systems, as well as back-end warehousing and logistics management, financial accounting, and other full-chain functions, while integrating order systems, warehouse management systems, and transportation management systems (TMS).

In July 2024, the system began rolling out to the first store, with full national store coverage expected by Q1 2025. For franchisees, the entire process from ordering, warehouse fulfillment and delivery, to store receipt can be completed and tracked on the digital platform.

The decision to fully self-develop stems from the highly dynamic nature of retail business operations: membership systems and marketing systems change frequently, each store's management has certain differences, and transaction systems and supply chain management systems all have industry-specific characteristics. Therefore, we chose to independently develop this retail business middle-platform system to better support actual needs at the store level. Of course, as the business rapidly evolves and new scenarios emerge, this system will continue to iterate and upgrade.

Mingming Henmang's principle for digitalization is "IT-business integration." The digital team is organized into different groups by business domain — such as POS, payments, franchisee management, store inspections, and so on — with each group containing product, development, and testing personnel. This structure allows the digital team to focus deeply on their respective business domains. As experience accumulates, product and R&D personnel gradually become domain experts, gaining deeper understanding of the underlying business logic, even eating and living together with business teams to jointly deliver results.

Regarding AI, we began exploring how AI technology could help improve efficiency in actual business operations as early as 2021.

It's worth emphasizing that given the company's rapid business growth, Mingming Henmang's digitalization has not followed a gradual path from IT to DT to AI, but rather a "leapfrog integrated development." Currently, Mingming Henmang is simultaneously improving its digital systems (going from 1 to N), advancing big data-related work, and carrying out AI efficiency initiatives in parallel.

So in which areas has Mingming Henmang already applied AI technology?

In the store checkout process, the "smart scale" we developed with partners can help identify loose-weight product SKUs without manual code entry, significantly improving checkout efficiency for bulk-sold items. Current recognition accuracy is approaching 95%.

In the receiving process, store staff can use AI capabilities to photograph and identify corresponding goods for receipt confirmation, also with high recognition accuracy. Each store delivery may contain 300-400 items; manual counting would require substantial time.

As store numbers grew rapidly, we found that remote inspection staff scale was expanding quickly. To improve inspection efficiency, the company is also experimenting with AI-enabled automated video inspection. Currently, we have trained corresponding AI video detection models for different inspection sub-scenarios. For example, if an empty basket on a display shelf exceeds operational standards in duration, the system can automatically flag the key video frame for human secondary verification. This capability is already deployed across several thousand stores.

One point worth emphasizing: when Mingming Henmang leverages AI technology, it's not AI for AI's sake, but rather identifying business pain points where AI is the only solution and the most efficient approach.

We believe that as computing costs decrease and model accuracy improves, AI-driven cost reduction and efficiency gains will become even more pronounced. Taking AI video store inspection as an example: as stores grow, required remote inspection staff grows linearly; based on our calculations, current AI inspection costs are roughly on par with human costs. Going forward, as computing costs decline and scale increases, AI inspection's cost advantage will become more prominent.

Looking ahead, we believe IT, DT, and AI will inevitably converge, with the potential to further drive intelligent decision-making and refined management in the supply chain. For example, the recently piloted intelligent ordering function, by forecasting store sales, can intelligently plan procurement timing and quantities from suppliers. We've been pleasantly surprised to find that after this system's real-world deployment, warehouse inventory turnover and product availability rates both improved — turnover decreased while availability increased, forming a favorable seesaw effect.

Corresponding to intelligent ordering is intelligent store-level requisition and replenishment, currently still in testing, which guides stores to order based on actual sales and current inventory.

Additionally, the team continues to monitor the latest AI technology developments, such as AI Agents. Currently, remote video store inspection still requires considerable effort in model training and labeling. We look forward to a future where Agents can learn autonomously, execute labeling and scoring independently — which would be revolutionary for our efficiency gains.

Mingming Henmang's corporate culture is "integrity, efficiency, excellence, and altruism." By altruism, we mean that only with an altruistic mindset can teams collaborate effectively; on a broader level, Mingming Henmang aspires to become "the people's snacks" — affordable and accessible to everyone.

Today Mingming Henmang is primarily focused on the leisure snack sector. In the future, we hope to serve more consumers with more and better products — for example, healthier products more aligned with young people's lifestyles — and together venture toward broader horizons.