This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on August 28, 2021.
On August 24, 2021, Jiumaojiu released its first-half 2021 results. The group returned to profit, reporting RMB 205 million in profit for the period.
Jiumaojiu began with its namesake Northwestern Chinese cuisine brand, but from 2020 onward its profitability increasingly depended on Tai Er, the sauerkraut fish brand popular with younger diners. In the first half of 2021, Tai Er generated RMB 1.603 billion in revenue, accounting for 79.3% of total revenue, and contributed 92.8% of the group’s operating profit.
Jiumaojiu operates and manages Chinese restaurant brands, including Jiumaojiu, Tai Er, 2 Eggs Pancake, Song, and Uncle Chef.
Its two main revenue brands were Jiumaojiu Northwestern Cuisine and Tai Er Sauerkraut Fish. In the first half of 2021, they generated RMB 382 million and RMB 1.603 billion in revenue respectively, representing 18.9% and 79.3% of total revenue.
By business line, restaurant operations, delivery, and specialty-product sales generated RMB 1.704 billion, RMB 302 million, and RMB 5.408 million respectively, accounting for 84.3%, 15.0%, and 0.3% of revenue.
Tai Er’s expansion was aggressive: from 13 stores in 2016 to 286 stores by the first half of 2021. In 2020, Tai Er’s revenue reached RMB 1.962 billion, or 72.3% of total revenue, overtaking Jiumaojiu Northwestern Cuisine for the first time as the group’s main performance contributor.
That shift was partly a management choice. During the pandemic-hit 2020 period, Jiumaojiu closed 66 restaurants, including 55 Jiumaojiu Northwestern Cuisine stores, while closing only two Tai Er stores.
The group’s tilt toward Tai Er was clear. As the Jiumaojiu Northwestern Cuisine brand aged, its operating margin kept declining. By 2020, its margin, table-turnover rate, and per-capita spend were all below Tai Er’s.
Tai Er’s store rollout and revenue growth remained strong, but its table turnover showed pressure. In the first half of 2021, Tai Er’s turnover rate was 3.7, up slightly from 3.4 in the first half of 2020, but far below 4.9 in the first half of 2019.
The sauerkraut fish category itself was also cooling. According to Qichacha data cited in the article, 10,329 sauerkraut fish stores opened in 2020, while 11,299 closed. Closures exceeded openings, suggesting negative growth for the category.
For Jiumaojiu, that created a bottleneck: the legacy Jiumaojiu brand’s operating margin was falling, while Tai Er’s table turnover was also declining. In August 2021, the company launched a new brand, Lai Meili Green Sichuan Pepper Grilled Fish, in search of another growth driver.
Finding another brand that could extend Tai Er’s performance became a priority. In the first half of 2021, Jiumaojiu introduced Tai Er Qianzhuan, Lai Meili Green Pepper Grilled Fish, and accelerated the expansion of Song Chongqing Hotpot Factory. Yet the group still appeared to be operating in Tai Er’s shadow, close to the trap of path dependence.
As sauerkraut fish in China entered a bottleneck period, Tai Er moved one step toward Sichuan cuisine with Tai Er Qianzhuan, targeting a category that had broad demand but fewer dominant brands.
The brand also looked overseas, using Sichuan cuisine as a calling card. Tai Er’s first Singapore store officially opened on August 20, 2021. The Singapore menu emphasized a “Sichuan cuisine ambassador” positioning and, beyond its signature sauerkraut fish, added classic Sichuan dishes including Sichuan cold mung-bean jelly, sliced beef and ox tongue in chili sauce, Sichuan dan dan noodles, Sichuan saliva chicken, and boiled beef.
Tai Er also expanded through delivery and retail products.
Before the pandemic, Tai Er was known for refusing delivery. After the outbreak, it had to launch delivery. According to Jiumaojiu’s financial data, delivery accounted for 23.1% of revenue in the first half of 2020. Its share declined in the first half of 2021, but the absolute delivery revenue rose from RMB 220 million to RMB 300 million.
In specialty products, Tai Er opened a Tmall flagship store. Its product range centered on sauerkraut-related items, including sauerkraut beef sauce and crispy chili fermented-soybean sauce, as well as cold-eaten beef, spicy kelp, spicy chicken gizzard products, floral tea, Wuchang rice matching the in-store product, and IP merchandise.
Specialty products remained small at 0.3% of group revenue, but grew quickly. Revenue from specialty-product sales rose 324.8%, from RMB 1.3 million for the six months ended June 30, 2020 to RMB 5.4 million in the same period of 2021, mainly due to continued development of Tai Er-branded products.
Both Jiumaojiu Northwestern Cuisine and Tai Er were full-service dining concepts. The earlier 2 Eggs Pancake brand never gained much momentum, likely because the team’s operating DNA was in full-service restaurants.
In hotpot, Jiumaojiu moved from Song cold-pot skewers to Song hotpot and gradually found a better fit in one of the largest Chinese restaurant categories. However, Song’s table-turnover rate was only 2.2, compared with 3.7 for Tai Er in the same system and 3.0 for Haidilao, leaving the hotpot business with multiple challenges.
Lai Meili, the grilled-fish brand extended from Jiumaojiu’s fish expertise, followed a playbook similar to Tai Er’s: sharp positioning, simplified messaging, and a clear product hook. Its central selling point was “live fish, grilled to order.” It emphasized fish from its own ponds, transparent kitchens, and the idea of selling live fish openly.
Like Tai Er’s strategy of using only sea bass, Lai Meili said it used only high-end longsnout catfish and limited supply to 100 fish per day.
Externally, the grilled-fish market had already passed its consumer-education phase. The industry was above RMB 100 billion in scale, with brands including Tan Yu, Lu Yu, Yu Cool, Ban Tian Yao, and Yuan Zhe Shang Gou. Ban Tian Yao had about 600 stores and was a leading brand. Even so, there was still room for new entrants to scale.
Jiumaojiu’s extension logic in hotpot and grilled fish appeared to be: choose large, mature categories; apply youthful branding and simplified SKUs; improve marketing and store operating efficiency; rely on mainstream shopping-mall traffic; and use data accumulated through Tai Er and Jiumaojiu to support faster brand growth.
The article’s author had visited Song hotpot several times and found the SKU count genuinely streamlined and the store atmosphere youthful. But the value-for-money proposition was weak, and in a crowded hotpot market, Song did not yet offer a compelling enough reason to choose it over alternatives.
For Lai Meili, the question was whether Jiumaojiu’s prior fish-category experience and playful brand culture could capture younger consumers’ attention. That still needed time to prove.
Across Jiumaojiu Northwestern Cuisine, Tai Er Sauerkraut Fish, Tai Er Qianzhuan Sichuan cuisine, Song cold-pot skewers, Song hotpot, and Lai Meili grilled fish, the group covered Northwestern cuisine, sauerkraut fish, Sichuan cuisine, hotpot, and grilled fish.
The strategy seemed to focus on younger consumers: use multiple front-end brands to capture demand, connect the back-end data, build a traffic pool of young diners, and improve customer acquisition and cross-brand rotation efficiency.
But whether that logic truly worked remained open.
A customer will not eat sauerkraut fish every day. A multi-brand, multi-category ecosystem for younger diners therefore has some strategic logic.
The question is whether youthfulness is a true underlying differentiator.
In the article’s argument, youthfulness works when a brand already has a strong core distinction, then attracts stylish young consumers who make the brand feel contemporary. Without that underlying distinction, youthfulness risks becoming only a social-media check-in point.
Liu Chuanqi, founder of Legend Catering Brand Strategy Consulting, argued that Jiumaojiu’s youth-focused story was partly a capital-market narrative and that the company had not built enough concrete value innovation around it, relying more on eye-catching decor and presentation.
The article contrasted Jiumaojiu with Haidilao, which focused on hotpot and extended into related businesses such as Yihai for seasonings and convenient foods, Shuhai for supply chain, Weihai Consulting for human resources and training, and Shuyun Dongfang for interior fit-out.
Jiumaojiu had two possible directions: continue as a youth-focused brand factory, or build deeper upstream and downstream capabilities around fish-based dining. The article argued that a fish-dining industry chain could potentially create stronger scale effects.
Liu Chuanqi viewed Jiumaojiu’s youth-focused brand-factory exploration as valuable. But at that point, he felt it looked more like a company entertaining itself with cool branding than building deep user relationships.
Jiumaojiu’s new-brand incubation had long relied on youthfulness. But young consumers are novelty-seeking and have limited loyalty. That means Jiumaojiu would have to keep innovating and keep converting creativity into profit.
The company would need to keep finding the next Tai Er, and the one after that, with little gap between them, because capital markets are unforgiving and want to see strong performance.
Note: financial figures, store counts, expansion plans, and market commentary are historical as of the article’s August 2021 publication context.