This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on November 4, 2022.
Calorie control has become a shared premise across many weight-management approaches: consumers need to match energy intake and nutrition to their own physical condition. The harder question is operational: how can a diner know what they are actually eating each day?
Wei Qiang, founder of Vesta Health Management and its delivery fast-food brand Weixiaofan, argues that this is especially difficult for Chinese food. Compared with many Western meals, where meat and vegetables are more visibly separated, Chinese cuisine uses diverse ingredients, seasonings, and cooking methods, making nutrition data harder to control.
Weixiaofan’s proposed answer is a data-driven operating model: standardized processes, lab-tested data, fully prepared meals from a central kitchen, rapid cooling, cold-chain distribution, and reheating at service points. As of the article’s publication, the brand operated in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. According to company data, daily deliveries through its mini program and Meituan totalled about 15,000 orders, average order value was RMB35, and repeat purchase rate reached 70%, defined as users ordering more than twice within one week. Vesta had recently raised nearly RMB100 million in Series A financing from Tiantu Capital.
Unlike online meal-replacement or regular-meal brands such as Dongchi and Boohee Health, Vesta entered through fresh delivery meals. It built a 6,000-square-meter central kitchen in Shenzhen’s Longgang district and kept R&D and production self-operated, which raised the burden on supply-chain control.
Wei’s business idea came from his own health-management experience. Before going to a health-management center in Jeju Island in 2017, he weighed more than 200 jin, had high blood pressure and diabetes, and had twice been sent for emergency care after losing consciousness.
Tsutomu Hoshino, the Japanese chef responsible for Wei’s three meals a day at the center, recalled that Wei initially looked as if he might collapse when sitting down. The medical team advised that treatment had to come before weight loss because Wei’s life was at risk. In the first month, Wei mainly used diet and slow walking to control blood pressure. More intensive training such as swimming was added from the second month.
Losing 7 kilograms in the first month gave Wei confidence. Hoshino cooked with less oil and salt: chicken breast was slow-cooked at low temperature in vacuum bags to keep it tender; vegetables were cooked in a pan with only one or two drops of olive oil, then covered quickly so steam could restore ingredient flavor while reducing salt use. Around two months into training, Wei began asking whether this could become a business in China.
In Japan, Hoshino saw this as a mature category. First, Japan’s food safety rules require nutrition labeling on packaged processed foods, including calories, nutrients, content levels, and allergens. Although the regulation was introduced in 2015, consumers had already treated such labeling as common practice for years.
Second, Japan has many nutrition-meal operators. TANITA, the scale company, built restaurants around sets positioned at 500 calories and 3 grams of salt, expanding beyond its first Tokyo store into multiple areas and hospitals. After the pandemic, frozen bento home-delivery operators proliferated, from established YOSHIKEI to newer players such as Nosh. Their shared proposition was menus designed by professional nutritionists, balancing taste and convenience. Compared with convenience-store bento, these services emphasized variety and relatively low prices, from about JPY300 to JPY700, attracting young single office workers. In 2020, YOSHIKEI sold more than 135 million semi-prepared and prepared meals. In narrower segments, operators also served baby food and special meals for seniors and people with chronic diseases such as diabetes.
After three months in Jeju and a 54-jin weight loss, Wei returned to China facing the challenge of avoiding rebound. He said Weixiaofan began as a way to solve his own problem: cooking was too laborious. He later framed it as extending a personal need to a broader consumer use case.
Wei’s first successful startup had already taught him the value of data. Vesta’s RMB160 million starting capital came from Wei and friends’ own funds. In his earlier Shenzhen business, OneTouch, he provided outsourcing services such as import-export customs declaration for SMEs. Paper customs documents once had no value after being locked away; once moved into IT systems, information such as category, product name, counterparty, logistics method, and payment price became usable data. One application was helping companies obtain bank loans. Alibaba later acquired OneTouch outright.
Wei connected that data experience to health management. In Jeju, doctors gave coaches and chefs guidance for his coming week’s energy expenditure and dietary intake, while the chef made meals within that range based on personal preferences.
When Vesta launched in October 2019, its products included two mini programs: digital fitness and digital diet. Users could build exercise plans and view energy expenditure in one, then receive meal plans from the other. Vesta initially also operated offline gyms.
The company later focused on delivery fast food. In May 2020, Vesta officially launched its three-color meal boxes, using red, green, and white to distinguish meat, vegetables, and staple foods. The box design considered food volume, refrigeration, reheating, stacking stability, and a unit cost of RMB0.80.
Wei brought Hoshino to China to make Chinese food that could be measured, quantified, and standardized. Hoshino had nutrition-meal expertise and consulting experience for central kitchens, but still encountered unexpected operational challenges.
He said dishes such as non-fried laziji and lower-oil mapo tofu were possible, but local cooks were often unfamiliar with the methods. Techniques included using an oven and then an overhead broiler to control oil, or using combi steam ovens. For central-kitchen production, ten portions cannot be made simply by multiplying ingredients by ten: steps and processes must change. A single-portion dish might add soy sauce, then sugar, then salt; in batch production, this may become one seasoning sauce added once, requiring a decision on timing.
Hoshino also emphasized process efficiency: washing vegetables in a line was faster than washing and straining batch by batch, and seasoning-sauce ingredients needed to be reusable across dishes.
Ingredient quality also affected output. Yellowing broccoli could result from multiple causes, including aging or sitting too long after heating. Vesta combined tighter quality inspection with repeated experiments, such as soaking with flour, salt water, or lemon juice.
In summary, Vesta’s approach to standardizing Chinese food relied on repeated testing, fixed processes, and more machinery. Each Weixiaofan dish mainly used one ingredient and no more than two, while meats were generally deboned and skinned to improve data stability.
Wei told Xinshangye Youdao that about 10% of users carefully studied data, such as calculating protein intake by body weight, but 100% cared about health. In his view, Weixiaofan’s role was to turn “health” into usable numbers.
The brand had gained 250,000 registered members, but also faced complaints on delivery platforms: portions were small, prices were high, taste was average, and packaging was not environmentally friendly. With each box weighing 80 to 100 grams, male customers might need five or six boxes. Excluding set meals and delivery-platform discounts, a single meat item cost RMB10 to RMB30, higher than ordinary fast food.
Gao Haiyan, vice president and founding partner of Weixiaofan, described this as a market-education phase for a new category. Taste conversion and the body’s perception of hunger both require adaptation. Hoshino said Weixiaofan was not trying to make dishes that were “120% delicious”; the target was food close to delicious that also made users feel it was beneficial to the body. To reduce environmental concerns, Weixiaofan launched a meal-box recycling program.
From the second half of 2021, Weixiaofan accelerated both site expansion and new-product launches. It moved from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, from core CBD areas to more suburban areas, and from reheating points in office buildings to “Weixiaofan stations” where customers could order on site.
Gao attributed this to a more mature data model. The company targeted young office workers and placed sites around their locations. It segmented product selection by high clicks, high repeat purchase, stockout-sensitive categories, and male and female preferences, aiming to improve site yield and reduce write-offs. Weixiaofan used cold-chain delivery; unsold meals were written off the same day.
Wei said this is why Weixiaofan had more product managers than typical foodservice companies. Beyond common user-operations roles, the company needed people to analyze category data and feed information back to the R&D backend.
New-product development also accelerated because backend data showed that new launches significantly lifted repeat purchase. Weixiaofan expanded into regional cuisines such as Minnan-style lychee pork, satay noodles, and Korean-style fried chicken strips. This created pressure for R&D and operations because more ingredients and inventory raised the risk of losses from slow-selling items.
The team also debated whether to focus on B2B or consumer business. Early on, Vesta developed many enterprise customers including kindergartens and hospitals because Wei saw meals for special groups as a clear need. But he said B2B had high barriers and entrenched interests, and even gyms were difficult to enter. Three months before the article, Vesta set a strategy to focus mainly on consumer users.
Beyond adding categories, expanding offline sites, and reaching more users, Vesta was testing broader possibilities. Wei believed healthy eating was a major trend. Vesta’s current role was to build examples and standards; in the future, he hoped more foodservice companies capable of data-driven and standardized operations would join an ecosystem. Vesta also wanted to create more usage occasions beyond three daily meals, which was part of the reason it had recently spun out the Weixiaofan brand.
Vesta grew daily orders from 1,000 to 10,000 in seven months. Its central kitchen, built in October 2019, was no longer sufficient, so the company began a new expansion intended to support 40,000 daily orders. Wei’s next short-term target was for Shenzhen to reach 30,000 daily orders, which he said would allow daily operating breakeven excluding fixed investment. Even as a second-time founder with ample capital, Wei said he remained crisis-conscious and reminded the team every week to ask how many days the company had before failure.
Note: financing, capacity, order targets, breakeven comments, and other forward-looking figures are historical as of November 4, 2022.