FoodBud

Before the Castle, Part 2 — 1997: The Shaved-Ice Winter ("Three Deaths, Three Rebirths") ### 1997：刨冰的冬天——"三死三生" **A FoodBud translated & annotated edition of Mixue co-founder Zhang Hongfu's first-person memoir**

*Series: "Before the Castle — How Mixue Was Really Built, 1997–2017" · Article 2 of 12 · FoodBud /insights*

1. FoodBud Editor's Note

Article 1 left Zhang Hongchao (张红超) — the brother who would found Mixue — placing first in his department at the Henan College of Finance and Economics, having funded himself through college on a bicycle. Article 2 is the founding itself: 1997, the year the business that became MIXUE Group (HKEX: 2097) actually began, told by his younger brother and co-founder Zhang Hongfu (张红甫) — Mixue's *"generation 1.5,"* former CEO, now Co-Chairman.

What it is *not* is a clean founding story. There is no garage, no investor, no plan — there is a self-welded ice shaver, a grandmother's savings sewn into a pair of underwear, and a first year that Zhang Hongfu sums up as *"three deaths and three rebirths."* For an industry reader, this is where Mixue's two most durable traits first appear in embryo: a near-obsessive do-it-yourself, make-don't-buy instinct (the seed of the vertical supply chain that now feeds a 59,823-store network), and a hard, early education in store-location economics. Keep the data lens from Article 1 in mind — today's scale is measured in systemwide sales / GMV and store count, not company revenue — and watch it begin here at a two-square-meter window stall.

2. Why This Year Matters

Mixue dates its founding to 1997, but 1997 produced no enduring store — it produced *lessons*, paid for in failures. The chapter is the clearest possible rebuttal to the overnight-success reading of Chinese consumer brands: the founder spent a year opening, closing, and relocating a one-person stall, and ended it with little more than experience. Below, the source is presented as a FoodBud translated and annotated edition — a close English translation of the 1997 chapter in Zhang Hongfu's own order, direct quotations marked — with FoodBud's framing and analysis kept in their own sections.

—— FoodBud English Translation of the Source · Part 2 Begins —— *(Close translation of Zhang Hongfu's memoir covering the 1997 founding year. Lines in quotation marks are translated directly from the source; surrounding prose is a close translation of the connecting text.)*

The Birth of "Cold-Snap Shaved Ice" (寒流刨冰诞生记)

"My grandmother was our angel investor, our first product tester, and our chief risk officer."

In 1997 the narrator was in fifth grade, on the verge of adolescence and starting to yearn for the world outside, so any news from his brother in Zhengzhou made him prick up his ears. In his mind the brother — knowledgeable, capable, a know-it-all — was certain to make something of himself in the big city. That spring, he overheard a cousin back from Zhengzhou say the brother was about to open a *lěngyǐn* shop, and had sent word asking whether their parents could scrape together a little money to bring over. The boy, who had read in a magazine about a thing called "thermal printing," at first imagined a *lěngyìn* shop — some cold-medium *printing* technology, a print works — and felt a thrill that his brother was finally doing big business. Only later did he understand: it was a cold-drinks shop. Having only ever known the word "iced" — iced soda, ice packs, popsicles — he found the term "cold drinks" exotic and full of promise; and as a boy who had never had enough popsicles or iced soda, he counted the days until he could go to Zhengzhou.

That August, he went with their father. The brother met them at the station and took them to his shop, at the gate of the Baimiao farmers' market at the corner of Dongfeng Road and Wenhua Road (long since demolished, now an electronics market). It was a window stall of about two square meters: a freezer at the very back, a table against the window bearing a shaver, a small cutting board, and some knives and spoons; room for perhaps two people to stand and work; a small plastic ceiling fan whirring overhead; a cassette Walkman hanging on the sill, wired to a shell-less, bare-component "power amp" the brother had made, which in turn ran out to a very loud speaker blaring pop music. The brother quickly made two drinks and brought them to a folding table under a tree near the door — glasses with a few ice cubes, mint or orange, the narrator forgets which. He thought them the best drinks he'd ever had, probably because the iced drinks he'd had before had no ice cubes and were mostly mixed from saccharin.

Years later he learned this wasn't the brother's first store at all; he'd only recently moved here. The first store had been in Yanzhuang, on Jinshui Road in Zhengzhou's eastern suburb — then one of the city's best-known "urban villages," now the Manhattan commercial district. Why shaved ice? Nearing graduation, the brother had decided he couldn't keep juggling odd jobs forever and needed something stable and long-term — and remembered a street of shaved-ice stalls by the stadium back in Shangqiu: big blocks of ice shaved into snow, drizzled with syrup, dotted with raisins, crushed peanuts, and hawthorn strips, with candied seasonal fruit mixed in — drinkable, edible, and wonderfully cold. In two or three years in Zhengzhou he had never seen it, so he resolved to bring it there. That spring, near his graduation internship, he went back to that Shangqiu stadium street, drank his way through several stalls, studied carefully how each was made, and — good with his hands, a top student in physics, chemistry, and biology — soon had it figured out. On the way home he bought sugar and fruit, froze ice, boiled syrup, and made the first cup for their grandmother.

She tasted it and praised it lavishly, which firmly settled his confidence to take shaved ice to Zhengzhou. Then came raising the money. The family had none; the grandmother took out her bottom-of-the-chest savings (by then the eldest brother and sister had graduated, the brother's work-study meant no more tuition, and the grandfather had a stable pension, so she'd put a little aside). Train stations being thick with pickpockets in those days, she sewed a pocket into the brother's underwear, tucked the 3,000 yuan inside, and stitched the opening shut.

"My grandmother was our angel investor, our first product tester, and our chief risk officer."

With 3,000 yuan in his shorts, the brother rode the train to Zhengzhou, and the first thing he did on arrival was run to a bank near the school to deposit it. The teller asked why the money was *wet*: the weather wasn't even hot yet, but he'd been so nervous the whole way that his sweat had soaked through the bills, freshly unpicked and not yet dried.

With the funds in place, he found a spot. Wenhua Road north was then a dead end, so Chenzhai had not yet become Zhengzhou's biggest urban village; Yanzhuang, in the eastern suburb, was the biggest, and there he picked a stall — *"a stall"* being generous: a half-open-air, two- or three-square-meter slot under the corridor outside a rental house, set out by day and, after closing, packed up and carried into the landlord's courtyard under a plastic sheet. The big pieces of equipment came secondhand from the used market at Zhengzhou's Huanghe Food City: an 800-yuan secondhand freezer, and — since no ready-made shaver was for sale — he built one himself. He bought a motor, welded a frame with a height-adjusting screw thread, welded a gripping disc studded with nails to hold the ice block (like a football boot's cleats), and mounted a blade plate beneath it on the same principle as a carpenter's plane. One shaved-ice machine, built from scratch. The narrator, who operated it himself, even includes a rough hand drawing of it from memory.

The work table came from the brother's own rented room; the speaker and amp he assembled from parts. He'd bought the wooden shell of an old Hongdeng-brand radio and a separate Hi-Vi speaker to fit inside it — but the speaker's mouth was larger than the radio's original opening, and he had no tool to bore a bigger circle. At his wit's end, he noticed the hole matched the diameter of the coal balls in the corridor, and in the end burned the round hole to size with a lit coal ball placed on the box; the speaker fit perfectly. The shell-less amp he soldered himself from a transformer, integrated circuits, and diodes bought at the Zhongzhou electronics market by the train station — no harder, the narrator figures, than the radios he'd assembled from parts back in junior high. And the buckets of syrup, in every flavor, he boiled himself: strawberry or other fruit diced, mixed with sugar, simmered to a sticky thickness, bottled, and hauled to the stall by tricycle.

Why make his own equipment, his own ingredients?

"Because he had to save money. The total startup capital was 3,000 yuan — rent, wiring, a signboard, a little equipment and ingredients, and it was basically all gone. And back then there was no concept of a supply chain. If he didn't make these things himself, he couldn't even buy the equipment and ingredients he needed."

His rented room became a back kitchen — pots, pans, and a coal stove lined up in a row. By day he took money and made the drinks alone; by night he cleaned up, closed the stall, carried it home, and boiled the next day's syrup; in the morning he delivered the ingredients to the stall and rushed to the Zhengzhou meat-processing plant near Nanyang Road to load ice. His rest each day was about the same rhythm as during his exam-prep month — three or four hours. His sister, then posted to Luoyang for work, says his calls usually came after midnight, when she was already asleep: *neighboring cities, and yet a time difference on the phone.*

Above the window hung four big characters: Cold-Snap Shaved Ice (寒流刨冰). The little Baimiao window stall was small and hot, facing southwest into the afternoon sun that the distant tree shade couldn't reach at midday; its only cooling was that plastic fan. Customers ordered at the door; he made the drinks inside and carried them out, glasses to the shaded table — sweat pouring, the overhead fan drying him off. By the end of a day, his upper body was crusted with salt grains and his T-shirt was nearly board-stiff. He joked he sweated ten *jin* a day in summer — likely more, the narrator thinks, since he drank water all day and barely needed the toilet; it all came out as sweat.

"By today's eyes it looks bitter and exhausting. But back then I never saw a trace of fatigue on his face — only burning passion."

Why so full of fire? Because he was making money. At 0.5 to 1.5 yuan a drink, he could sell over a hundred yuan a day; over a month, after a few hundred in rent and ingredients, nearly 1,000 yuan landed in hand — against his sister's salary of 200 yuan over the same period. The thrill of one person out-earning several swept away all the hardship. He had, the narrator says, no lofty dream then — just to make money first, to give something back to the family, and to buy a house before thirty and bring his parents over.

"In Jack Ma's words, he was the 'deep-bitterness-and-grievance' type of founder."

Later, opening his own stores, the narrator understood the feeling better: it isn't that *you* feel hard-done-by — it's that *others* think you look hard-done-by, while you're actually quite suited to, even immersed in, that high intensity. Like raising a child: changing diapers at midnight looks filthy and exhausting to others, but is really just a natural process of nurture, with its own bitterness and joy.

He recalls going with the brother to the Nanyang Road meat plant for ice — not today's small machine-made cubes, but giant blocks about 1.2 meters long, 60 cm wide, 30 cm thick. The brother hacked two blocks into halves with a carried knife, bagged them in woven sacks, loaded some onto the narrator's bicycle and three sections onto his own. Crossing Dongfeng Road by his shop, with too many cars and an unstable load, the brother toppled over — in the middle of the road, unable to right the bike, the three sections weighing at least 150 *jin* while he, 178 cm tall, weighed only 110-some. The narrator watched anxiously from the curb as his brother, under the blazing sun and weaving traffic, unloaded the ice, secured the bike, and re-lashed the sacks; by the time he was done, a third of the ice had melted and he was soaked through. From years of handling ice bare-handed in the heat, his finger joints developed arthritis, and look swollen to this day. Why such big blocks? Because the small cubes and ice machines of today didn't exist — the same reason he boiled his own syrup and welded his own gear: *none of it existed.* Let alone venture capital and funding rounds — never heard of them.

"In short, the conditions for starting a business back then were truly: you had to build everything yourself."

Living each full day this way, he reckoned that at this rate of earning he was getting closer and closer to his dream. And, without his noticing, autumn came.

Seedling — Surviving (幼苗，活下去)

"Everyone says starting a business is a brush with death nine times out of ten. In the very first year of Cold-Snap Shaved Ice, in 1997, we already went through three deaths and three rebirths."

The first store, in the Yanzhuang urban village, under a photo studio's corridor, ran only about two months; the narrator never saw it and only later heard how it closed. Yanzhuang's foot traffic looked heavy, and business was good at first — for about a month — then slid. The brother realized that an urban village's apparent bustle was deceptive: the same crowd, out early and back late, passed his door over and over. In scientific terms, the total "threshold population" wasn't enough — the same few hundred people, mostly lower-income, who'd splurge on a novelty now and then but, over time, lowered their frequency on a non-essential like drinks. After a month the business slid into the red, so he simply closed it. *Died on the disadvantage of place.*

"People thrive by moving; a tree dies by being moved."

He carried the whole kit to a second store, on Cuihua Road off Nanyang Road — also one the narrator never saw. Business there was decent, with two schools nearby and crowds at every class-letting. But the brother was diligent and sweet-tongued, and soon summer break thinned the customers; then Cuihua Road was dug up for roadworks and sealed off entirely — and never reopened, so you can't even find that road in Zhengzhou today. That store, too, lost its future — *died on place and timing.*

(The narrator also notes that later witness corrections add more detail to the Cuihua Road episode; this edition keeps the full correction in Article 03, where the memoir returns to that passage.)

So the Baimiao market store that the narrator saw — at Dongfeng and Wenhua Roads — was already the third. Luckily the brother invested nothing in fit-out — just some wiring, with cloth curtains to shade the window — so moving from place to place cost him little. The store sat at an intersection, with many restaurants nearby, not far from his alma mater, and diagonally across — at the southeast corner — stood the already-open Henan Science & Technology Market, then a gathering place for educated youth, so the Baimiao store did decent business. By autumn the brother had a few thousand yuan saved. But autumn is a killing season — *"one autumn rain, one layer colder"* — and gradually the business dried up. The Baimiao store, that autumn, was tormented by the *timing of heaven.*

There was nothing for it but to get through winter. So that autumn he pooled his frugally saved takings, a little of his sister's wages, and some money from selling the home village's autumn grain — about 10,000 yuan — and went in with a fruit-seller he knew to sell oranges. It went nowhere: they bought stock jointly, and because the brother was the smooth talker he ran sales, while the partner's couple kept the books and the cash. The brother felt business was decent, but by the next spring he was given no share of the profit; the partner's wife said they hadn't made any — so they hadn't, and at most they'd simply not work together again the next year. From that brief orange-selling partnership, then, he got nothing but experience.

So 1997, the first year of starting up, held three episodes and three storefronts: the first, Yanzhuang, lost on place; the second, Cuihua Road, lost on place and timing; the third, Baimiao, lost in winter — and yet each time he survived to begin again. *Three deaths, three rebirths.*

—— FoodBud English Translation of the Source · Part 2 Ends ——

3. FoodBud Notes

1. "Threshold population" is Mixue's first real unit-economics lesson. The Yanzhuang failure — heavy *visible* traffic but too small a *total* base, churning the same low-frequency customers — is, in plain language, a site-selection and addressable-demand lesson. Mixue's later genius at placing tens of thousands of stores where dense, repeat demand actually exists traces directly to this 1997 mistake.

2. "If he didn't make it himself, he couldn't buy it" is the seed of vertical integration. The self-welded shaver, the home-boiled syrup, the coal-ball-bored speaker — born of having 3,000 yuan and *"no concept of a supply chain."* Necessity-driven DIY in 1997 prefigures the strategic, cost-crushing, self-manufacturing supply chain that is Mixue's defining moat decades later. The instinct came first; the strategy was built on top of it.

3. Cost discipline is a survival reflex, not a slogan. Every decision here is dictated by a 3,000-yuan budget. The frugality FoodBud flagged in Article 1 as a *family habit* is, by 1997, an *operating method* — and it never leaves the company.

4. The founder's tolerance for brutal intensity is structural. Three or four hours' sleep, ten *jin* of sweat, arthritic knuckles from raw ice — and, per the memoir, no sense of being hard-done-by. A culture that later asks a lot of partners and franchisees is legible in how the founder treated himself first.

5. "Three deaths, three rebirths" is the survival-first thesis in miniature. The year produced no lasting store — only the refusal to leave the table. This is the same instinct that closes the memoir twenty years later, and the right frame for reading every expansion and retrenchment still to come.

4. Timeline (this installment)

  • Spring 1997 — Near graduation, Zhang Hongchao studies the Shangqiu shaved-ice stalls; makes the first cup for their grandmother.
  • 1997 — Grandmother funds the venture with 3,000 yuan (sewn into his underwear for the train); he opens the first stall in Yanzhuang, building his own ice shaver and amp from scratch.
  • Summer 1997 — The narrator visits the Baimiao market store (the third location) with their father.
  • 1997 (across the year) — Store 1 (Yanzhuang) closes on poor location; Store 2 (Cuihua Road) closes on location + roadworks; Store 3 (Baimiao) fades in the autumn cold.
  • Winter 1997 → spring 1998 — An orange-selling partnership earns nothing but experience.
  • *(Context: by 1997 the brother was already earning 800+ yuan/month as a district sales supervisor, but left the security to build his own business.)*

5. Pull Quotes (web-ready)

1. *"My grandmother was our angel investor, our first product tester, and our chief risk officer."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 2. *"Back then there was no concept of a supply chain. If he didn't make these things himself, he couldn't even buy the equipment and ingredients he needed."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 3. *"In the very first year of Cold-Snap Shaved Ice, in 1997, we already went through three deaths and three rebirths."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 4. *"People thrive by moving; a tree dies by being moved."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text)

Series navigation

*Before the Castle: How Mixue Was Really Built, 1997-2017 · Part 2 of 12 · FoodBud /insights*

*This is a translated and annotated edition, not an original FoodBud interview. Authorized translation: translated with permission from Zhang Hongfu's memoir (经授权翻译自张红甫回忆录). Original author/source: Zhang Hongfu (张红甫). The translated source is kept separate from FoodBud's Editor's Note, FoodBud Notes, timeline, and pull quotes.*

*Publication note: corporate data is primary-source-locked to HKEX filings where stated. Market capitalization and any FY2025 GMV / systemwide-sales figure are intentionally not stated. “Scale” means systemwide sales / GMV and store count, never company revenue. FoodBud is information only, not investment advice.*