Frozen-Food B2B Platform Dongpin Online Weighed a Nasdaq SPAC Listing at a $1 Billion Valuation

This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on July 23, 2022.

In June 2022, frozen-food B2B platform Dongpin Online was reported to be considering a public listing through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The company expected the merger and Nasdaq listing could be completed as early as the first quarter of 2023, with an estimated valuation of $1 billion.

Founded in 2015, Dongpin Online is a mobile e-commerce platform focused on the frozen-food B2B supply chain. Its stated model is to use mobile internet technology to rebuild information, capital and logistics flows in traditional frozen-food distribution, creating a “light platform, short process, fast model” for small and medium-sized restaurants, neighborhood convenience stores, wet markets and other small food-business owners.

Funding and Market Context

Public information showed that Dongpin Online had completed five financing rounds since its founding, with investors including Longling Capital, Shunwei Capital and Huixin Capital. In its most recent round at the time, the company raised about RMB120 million.

Comparable foodservice and fresh-food supply-chain businesses included Meicai and Shuhai, the supply-chain company associated with Haidilao. Meicai had previously been rumored to be considering a Hong Kong listing, though no clear follow-up had emerged.

For operators, the article’s key point was that B2B supply-chain businesses face demanding economics: gross margins are not high, while cold-chain infrastructure and distribution require heavy investment.

Operating Scale

According to Dongpin Online’s disclosed information at the time, its blended gross margin was about 12%.

Its business covered more than 10 cities in China and connected about 1,000 upstream suppliers with more than 400,000 downstream restaurants and food-business owners. The company said it served nearly 100 million consumers each month through those downstream customers, which included Meituan, Alibaba, Hema and Pupu.

Business Model

Dongpin Online combined self-operated distribution with a platform model. It aggregated back-end frozen-food suppliers and served restaurant outlets, fresh-food supermarkets and similar customers.

The pain points it targeted were familiar to foodservice operators:

• Long distribution chains: products can pass through multiple layers of distributors before reaching end customers. Dongpin Online’s role was to shorten the chain and improve turnover efficiency.
• Standardization and supply-demand matching: for frozen products, the central challenge is maintaining stability and value-for-money across the full chain from factory to end customer.

Dongpin Online linked frozen-food processors and end customers online, while building its own offline cold-chain logistics system. It collected and processed data to match production with upstream processors, then delivered frozen food to small and medium-sized restaurants and convenience stores. Product categories included frozen beef and lamb, frozen seafood, and frozen rice and flour products.

Cold Chain and Prepared Food Expansion

To support service quality and growing order demand, Dongpin Online built a last-mile cold-chain logistics system called Yixian Cold Chain. Yixian Cold Chain focused on integrated cold-chain warehousing and delivery and had more than 10 warehouse centers nationwide at the time.

The logic was to use Dongpin Online’s growing order base to support the logistics company’s development, while building a service feedback loop through a star-rating system and a driver-partner system.

Dongpin Online also incubated a consumer-facing prepared-food brand, Sancan Youliao. The brand developed community chain stores and partnered with strong convenience-store systems to open shop-in-shop locations. For example, it signed an exclusive prepared-food supply-chain strategic cooperation with Jianfu Convenience Store, first planning shop-in-shop coverage across more than 700 stores in Fujian before gradually expanding across Jianfu’s more than 2,000 outlets nationwide.

Operator Takeaway

The model can be summarized in three stages: first, build the B2B platform; second, after aggregating customers, add self-operated products and a supporting cold-chain logistics system while still working with other suppliers and third-party cold-chain partners to widen delivery coverage; third, incubate a proprietary consumer brand such as Sancan Youliao.

Against a weak capital-market backdrop in 2022, Dongpin Online’s potential SPAC route to the U.S. public markets was a relatively unusual path. If completed smoothly, it was expected to provide a reference case for supply-chain companies in China.

Note: SPAC timing, valuation, financing and IPO-related figures are historical as reported in July 2022.