This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on June 16, 2022.
According to Chunjian Capital, Bliss Cake had built a national cake operation spanning more than 300 cities, over 270 new-retail stores, 500 production and delivery centers, and more than 22 million private-domain users by June 2022. Founder Yuan Huohong described the company’s operating model around three core assets: its information system, supply chain, and brand/user base.
At Yuan’s office, a large dashboard showed live operating data across the network: delivery times, customer reviews, real-time sales, order-channel mix, and food-safety monitoring from store kitchens nationwide. Even small operating violations, such as staff placing a mobile phone on a workbench, could be captured by the system.
Bliss Cake began building its proprietary digital decision-making and management system in 2015. By 2022, R&D investment in digitization had exceeded RMB 100 million.
Yuan said the system digitized the full chain from customer order, raw-material preparation, production, and delivery to receipt confirmation and customer review. Reviews were pushed to the phones of the production staff who made the cake, while headquarters could also see them in the backend.
The system covered intelligent operations, order dispatching, digital production management, digital store inspections, logistics delivery, BI real-time analysis, order and finance settlement, and supply-chain systems including ERP, SRM, and WMS. Yuan argued that this reduced the manpower needed for national expansion because headquarters could monitor whether partners were producing to standard, cutting corners, or creating safety risks.
Bliss Cake’s second core asset was supply chain. At the time, the company had:
These assets supported the company’s “county, town, and village plan” for lower-tier market expansion.
Yuan described the company’s model as a “partner model,” distinct from conventional franchising or direct operation. Partners did not independently receive orders; all orders were dispatched by headquarters. To keep product quality consistent, headquarters supplied cake bases, cream, and other key semi-finished products and raw materials. Partners performed simple processing, finished the cake, and handled delivery.
Bliss Cake also supported partners with site selection, store decoration, product and technical training, brand marketing, platform and user operations, digital management systems, and customer service.
Compared with traditional cake shops, partners did not need to buy ovens, whipping equipment, flour, or eggs to make cake bases. Yuan said a county-level cake production center could be opened with RMB 150,000 of investment, versus about RMB 800,000 without this supply-chain setup.
By 2022, the partner model had been running for more than five years. Yuan said about 5% of stores had changed hands because owners no longer wanted to operate them, but that there were basically no closures.
On the back of the partner model, Bliss Cake proposed its “county, town, and village plan.” The company mainly covered prefecture-level cities at third-tier level and above, and had not yet penetrated counties, towns, and villages. Yuan said no domestic bakery brand had fully covered those markets.
The plan, launched in 2021, used prefecture-level cities as hubs and districts/counties as terminals. Bliss Cake aimed to reach more than 80% of China’s counties by 2024 and cover more than 2,000 county-level cities. Yuan said the ideal mature setup would be one semi-finished-product production center in each province.
The third core asset was brand and user value. Bliss Cake had built more than 30 online sales channels, including its app, WeChat mall, mini program, Tmall, JD.com, Meituan, and Alibaba, and had accumulated more than 22 million private-domain users.
Its operating model combined public-domain and private-domain traffic. It used platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Weibo for brand promotion, acquired users through takeaway and e-commerce platforms, and built private-domain operations around official accounts, mini programs or WeChat malls, communities, and memberships.
The company also invited celebrity endorsers including He Jiong, Liu Haoran, Wu Jing and Xie Nan, and Louis Koo, and launched endorser-specific products to reach different age groups.
Yuan said Bliss Cake generated annual transaction volume of more than RMB 1 billion, with about 50% from private-domain traffic and the rest from third-party platforms such as Meituan and Ele.me. The brand’s repeat-purchase and retention logic centered on birthday and afternoon-tea occasions.
Bliss Cake’s stated vision was to become “China’s No. 1 bakery brand” and realize its “double hundred” dream. The article said Bliss Cake often ranked first in birthday-cake sales rankings on Tmall, JD.com, and Meituan.
Yuan defined “China’s No. 1 bakery brand” by two metrics: first in revenue and first in coverage. He said he wanted the single cake category to exceed RMB 10 billion in sales, and he wanted Bliss Cake to deliver anywhere in China, including towns, villages, and remote hillsides.
He also said his goal was to build Bliss Cake into a company worth USD 10 billion. In Shenzhen, where the company started, he said Bliss Cake had about 20% market share. He believed national share could rise once infrastructure and production centers were fully in place nationwide, followed by stronger brand investment.
For brand building, Yuan said Bliss Cake would continue strengthening its content ecosystem over the following two years.
He explained the “double hundred” dream as: first, reaching RMB 10 billion in revenue by 2025; second, becoming a 100-year company. Founded in 2008, Bliss Cake was 87 years away from that second target at the time of the article.
Yuan opened the first Bliss Cake shop in Shenzhen in 2008. It was his fourth cake shop; the previous three had failed. After dropping out of school at age 16, he had worked as a cake-shop apprentice and learned the craft.
From the failures of the earlier stores, Yuan concluded that the owner should focus on sales rather than making cakes personally. That shift moved him from craftsman to merchant.
By 2014, Bliss Cake had more than 50 stores and had become a supplier to China Resources Vanguard. Yuan then made the decision to close stores after observing that customers were moving from in-store purchases to online ordering.
Bliss Cake shifted into O2O. Customers ordered online, and the company delivered within 2 to 5 hours. Its service promise was: RMB 1 compensation for each minute late, free delivery if late by 30 minutes, and double compensation if late by more than 60 minutes. The promise helped drive word of mouth and online order growth, so performance continued to grow despite store closures.
To support online growth, Bliss Cake invested in the information system described above. In 2019, alongside national expansion, it began opening offline stores again. Yuan said the logic was lower-cost user acquisition: online traffic had become more expensive, while each store could bring at least 10,000 online users based on the company’s data.
The newer stores supported both offline and online purchases and provided delivery within a three-kilometer radius, expanding each store’s operating range.
The article cited research showing China’s bakery market reached RMB 235.87 billion in 2019, up RMB 40.26 billion from 2018, or 20.6% year-on-year. In 2020, affected by COVID-19, the market declined to RMB 216.94 billion, down RMB 18.93 billion from 2019, or 8%. The cited forecast expected the market to recover to RMB 306.99 billion in 2023.
China’s per-capita bakery spending was cited at USD 24.6 per person, with per-capita consumption of about 7.8 kilograms, far below Europe, the United States, Japan, and other developed markets. The article also cited a 16.50% compound annual growth rate for China’s bakery food market in 2019, above the 5.44% growth rate of the overall food industry in the same period.
Bakery stores were also expanding from first- and second-tier cities into third- and fourth-tier cities, towns, and townships, aligning with Bliss Cake’s county, town, and village plan.
Yuan said founders need clear self-awareness about what they have and what they lack. He argued that long-term companies depend on their judgment of future trends and on innovation in business models and information technology. For Bliss Cake, he said the mobile internet was the major trend of the era, and the company’s task was to connect cake products with mobile internet demand.
He summarized the point this way: without mobile internet, Bliss Cake would not have reached its 2022 scale.
Note: Forward-looking targets, market forecasts, compensation promises, revenue goals, and company-value ambitions above are historical statements from the June 16, 2022 source article.