The world's largest restaurant chain is a $1 tea supply chain

Mixue is the world's largest restaurant chain by store count, and many Western investors still cannot name it.

At the end of 2025, Mixue Group reported 59,823 stores worldwide. That is larger than McDonald's at 45,356 stores and larger than Starbucks at 40,990 stores on FoodBud's locked operator data. It is not close. Mixue is not a niche Chinese bubble-tea story anymore. It is a nearly 60,000-unit foodservice network.

But this is exactly where the reading trap starts.

Mixue is larger than McDonald's by stores. It is not larger than McDonald's by system sales. Mixue is larger than Starbucks by stores. It is not larger than Starbucks by company revenue. Its listed-company revenue is not milk tea retail revenue. It is mostly revenue from selling goods and equipment to franchisees. Its overseas story is real, but in 2025 the official annual report says stores in Indonesia and Vietnam decreased as management optimized existing operations. Its stock once traded like a Hong Kong IPO phenomenon, but by July 23, 2026, the share price was only modestly above its HK$202.50 IPO price and far below its 52-week high.

So the right headline is not "China's tea giant is bigger than everyone." It is sharper:

That is why Mixue is a perfect FoodBud company. It makes the textbook version of every restaurant-data mistake: counting stores as sales, treating supply-chain revenue as consumer spending, comparing a franchise system to a company-operated chain, and using stock price as if it were operating scale.

Get the basis right, and Mixue becomes one of the clearest case studies in global foodservice: a Chinese value brand exporting a low-price, franchise-led, supply-chain-controlled model across Southeast Asia and beyond. Get the basis wrong, and every comparison becomes noise.

1. "Largest" depends on the denominator

If the denominator is stores, Mixue is enormous.

The 2025 annual report gives the cleanest number:

• 59,823 total stores as of December 31, 2025.
• 55,356 in mainland China.
• 4,467 outside mainland China.
• 59,785 franchised stores.
• 38 self-operated stores.

That means Mixue's store base is more than 99.9% franchised. The company operates a tiny number of stores mainly for operating insight and brand reinforcement. The system is franchise-led by design.

Now compare that with the two global names most Western readers know:

On stores, Mixue wins.

But stores are not sales. A 59,823-store value-beverage system is not automatically larger than a 45,356-store burger system. Mixue's drinks are typically priced around RMB6, or about US$1, per item. McDonald's has higher average tickets, much larger store-level throughput in many markets, and a locked FY2025 system-sales figure of $139.4 billion. Starbucks has a locked FY2025 company-revenue figure of $37.18 billion, but Starbucks revenue is a different basis from a franchised chain's system sales.

Mixue's own annual report makes the contrast explicit. It says Mixue ranked 62nd in the global food-and-beverage industry by 2025 GMV. That is not a small achievement. It is also not the same as being the world's largest by dollars.

That is the point. "Largest" has at least three answers:

1. Largest by stores: Mixue. 2. Largest by system sales / consumer spend: not Mixue; McDonald's is a much larger system. 3. Largest by listed-company revenue: depends on the company model; Starbucks revenue and Mixue revenue are not the same kind of number.

The Western blind spot is not simply that people have not heard of Mixue. It is that they tend to import Western chain categories into a company whose operating model is different. Mixue is not Starbucks China at scale. It is closer to a value-beverage franchisor with a deep supply-chain engine.

2. What Mixue actually sells

Consumers buy soft-serve, tea drinks, fruit drinks, coffee, and now beer across the Mixue system. But the listed company does not primarily book retail sales from those consumer transactions.

The company says its revenue comes mainly from:

• sales of goods and equipment, and
• franchise and related services.

In 2025, Mixue reported RMB33.56 billion of revenue. The breakdown matters:

That means more than 97% of Mixue's revenue came from goods and equipment, not from charging customers at the counter. It is a supply-chain monetization model.

This is why the best shorthand is not "the Starbucks of China." It is closer to "the Domino's of tea," but with an even more extreme store-ownership profile. Domino's is a franchisor plus supply-chain company: franchisees sell pizza to consumers, while the public company earns royalties, fees, and a large supply-chain revenue line. Mixue is a franchise-led beverage system where the parent company monetizes the system by selling ingredients, packaging, equipment, and services into a massive store network.

The difference is not semantic. It changes how you read the P&L.

For a company-operated chain, revenue is often close to restaurant sales. For a franchisor, revenue is only the parent company's take from the system. For Mixue, the biggest company-revenue line is a B2B supply-chain line. The consumer-facing network is much larger than the listed-company revenue line, but the listed company captures that network through inputs and services.

So when Mixue adds stores, the operating question is not just "how many more cups did it sell?" It is also:

• How many more franchisees need ingredients, packaging, equipment, and training?
• How much purchasing scale can the parent translate into cost advantage?
• How much standardization can the company enforce across a very large franchisee base?
• How much overseas supply-chain infrastructure is needed before Southeast Asia can scale profitably?

That is the model. A 59,823-store tea chain is impressive. A 59,823-store procurement, production, logistics, brand, and franchise-management system is the deeper story.

3. The 2025 data card: one company, four bases

Here is the current FoodBud read without mixing bases.

The table is the story.

Mixue has a huge store network. Its latest disclosed company revenue is RMB33.56 billion. Its locked FoodBud scale remains the FY2024 store-network GMV of RMB58.3 billion, converted to about US$8.10 billion, because the FY2025 annual report does not disclose an absolute FY2025 GMV number. It only says Mixue ranked 62nd globally in F&B by 2025 GMV.

That is why FoodBud does not replace GMV with revenue. It would be cleaner-looking and more wrong.

For Mixue, the correct public dataset has to say:

• FY2025 store count is fresh and source-backed.
• FY2025 revenue is fresh and source-backed.
• FY2024 GMV is the latest absolute GMV we have locked.
• FY2025 absolute GMV is not disclosed.
• The parent revenue line is not consumer sales.

This is less convenient than a single number, but it is honest. The entire point of FoodBud is to preserve that honesty at the data layer, then turn it into useful reading.

4. Why the Southeast Asia story is not a straight-line expansion story

Mixue's international story is real. The company has built a large overseas network for a Chinese beverage brand, with Southeast Asia as the center of gravity. The annual report says it had stores across China and 13 other countries at year-end 2025. It also says overseas strategy remains focused on Southeast Asia.

But the latest official disclosure is more nuanced than the usual "Chinese tea brands are conquering Southeast Asia" headline.

At the end of 2024, Mixue had 4,895 stores outside mainland China. At the end of 2025, that number was 4,467. The official overseas store count declined by 428.

The company explains the move in operational language. In Indonesia and Vietnam, it focused on optimizing existing store operations to support long-term, stable performance. During the reporting period, the number of stores in those two countries decreased. At the same time, Mixue entered Kazakhstan and the United States, while Lucky Cup opened its first stores in Malaysia and Thailand.

That is not a retreat from globalization. It is a shift from pure expansion to store-quality management.

For a franchise system, this distinction matters. A fast-growing franchise brand can always open more stores for a while. The harder question is whether the store base can survive local density, unit economics, franchisee quality, logistics cost, local taste adaptation, and competition. The 2025 overseas decline suggests Mixue is not just counting flags on a map. It is pruning, adjusting, and trying to make the model durable outside China.

That makes the Southeast Asia story more interesting, not less.

The simple story is:

Mixue is sweeping Southeast Asia.

The better story is:

Mixue is using Southeast Asia to test whether its China formula — low price, dense franchising, centralized supply, standardized operations, and brand IP — can travel without breaking store economics.

That is the question global operators should care about.

5. What makes the model exportable

Mixue's overseas potential starts with price.

The annual report describes products typically priced around RMB6, or about US$1, per item. That price point is unusual in global beverage chains. Starbucks sells an experience, a store environment, and a premium beverage habit. Many bubble-tea brands sell novelty and indulgence. Mixue sells value and frequency.

Low price is not enough by itself. A cheap product without supply-chain control usually means thin margins and franchisee stress. Mixue's model works only if the parent can make low price operationally repeatable.

The annual report points to three mechanisms:

1. Supply chain: centralized factories, procurement scale, production bases, and self-produced core ingredients. 2. Brand IP: the Snow King character and a mass-market identity that travels better than a narrow premium tea aesthetic. 3. Store operations: standardized franchise management and digital operating systems.

This is why the company talks about "Supply Chain + Brand IP + Store Operations." It is not marketing filler. It is the actual operating triangle.

In China, that triangle supports density in lower-tier markets. Overseas, especially in Southeast Asia, it has to be rebuilt under different conditions:

• different rent levels,
• different labor markets,
• different cold-chain and logistics constraints,
• different import / local sourcing rules,
• different franchisee pools,
• different taste preferences,
• different competitor sets.

If Mixue can localize the supply chain while keeping the price architecture intact, it has a chance to build a genuinely global value-beverage system. If the overseas supply chain is not dense enough, the low-price promise becomes harder to sustain. The brand can open stores faster than the operating system can mature.

That is why the overseas store decline in 2025 is not a footnote. It is the model telling us where the real test is.

There is a second reason the export question is harder than the store-count chart makes it look: Mixue's low price is not an isolated pricing decision. It is the output of a whole operating stack. The company describes itself as having an end-to-end supply chain across procurement, production, logistics, R&D, and store operations. In mainland China, that stack sits on top of enormous density. A dense store base lets the company buy more, produce more, route more, train more, and amortize systems over more franchisees. Density lowers the cost of standardization.

Overseas, density starts lower. That means the first several hundred stores in a market do not have the same economics as the ten-thousandth store in China. A country can have strong consumer demand and still be hard to operate if raw-material sourcing, cold-chain distribution, local production, labor training, and franchisee monitoring are not yet mature. A value brand has less room to hide those frictions in price. If a premium tea brand has a high ticket, it may absorb higher local costs for longer. A US$1-oriented brand has to build the operating base faster.

This is also why Mixue's model is more like infrastructure than a menu. The menu is simple enough to travel. The mascot is visible enough to travel. The difficult part is whether a franchisee in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, or Los Angeles can get the right inputs at the right cost, use the same operating process, and still sell at a price that feels like Mixue rather than a localized premium import.

The 2025 annual report gives two signals in the same direction. First, the company says it will continue to deepen Southeast Asia while expanding and enhancing the local franchised-store network. Second, it says it will build overseas supply-chain systems with a global sourcing, global manufacturing, and global selling orientation. Put those together and the export thesis becomes clear: Mixue is not just opening overseas shops; it is trying to reproduce the supply chain that makes the shops economically possible.

That is a slower, harder, and more valuable task than opening stores.

It also creates a useful watchlist for future filings:

• Does the company disclose country-level store count again, or only broad outside-mainland totals?
• Does overseas store count resume growth after the 2025 optimization year?
• Does management mention local production, local warehousing, or regional procurement hubs?
• Does overseas gross margin improve or remain masked inside group results?
• Do closures stay concentrated in early high-growth markets, or spread to newer markets?
• Does Lucky Cup overseas development become meaningful, or remain a small add-on to the Mixue tea-and-ice-cream network?

Those questions matter more than whether a social video shows a line outside a new store. Virality can launch a market. Supply chain decides whether the market compounds.

6. The China beverage cohort: do not force one comparison

Mixue is part of a broader Chinese foodservice export wave, but the companies inside the wave are not the same.

Luckin is a huge coffee system, but its model, pricing, digital engine, and listing status differ from Mixue. Chagee is a higher-ticket tea brand with a listed U.S. vehicle and a different customer proposition. Haidilao and Super Hi are restaurant-service systems, not beverage kiosks. Heytea is premium, brand-led, and more selective. Lao Xiang Ji is a Chinese quick-service operator trying to change its store model around a Hong Kong listing story.

Putting them all under "Chinese chains abroad" is useful only as a first filter. The next read has to split by model.

The common theme is not "China brands are everywhere." The common theme is that China has produced multiple restaurant operating models that can now travel:

• value-price franchise systems,
• digital coffee systems,
• premium tea brands,
• hotpot service systems,
• supply-chain and seasoning suppliers,
• restaurant SaaS and marketing layers.

That is why FoodBud's China IPO wave piece matters here. Hong Kong has become a window into these models because so many Chinese foodservice companies are trying to list there. The IPO market gives global readers a way to see the data. The hard part is reading the data correctly.

The temptation is to rank every Chinese chain by one glamorous number. Store count is the easiest. Market cap is the loudest. Revenue is the most available. But the cohort becomes more legible when we separate three layers.

The first layer is the consumer brand. Mixue's Snow King, Luckin's app-led coffee routine, Chagee's tea positioning, Heytea's premium reputation, and Haidilao's service theater are all brand-level propositions. This is the layer consumers see, and it is the layer social media usually amplifies.

The second layer is the operator model. Who runs the store? Who owns the store assets? Who pays rent and labor? Who buys the ingredients? Who takes the inventory risk? A company-operated chain, a franchised chain, a master-franchise system, and a JV-controlled market can all carry a consumer brand, but their economics land in different places.

The third layer is the public-company monetization model. Mixue monetizes mainly through goods and equipment sold to franchisees. Domino's monetizes through royalties, advertising, and supply chain. Starbucks monetizes a large company-operated base plus licensed economics, and China is now changing its ownership perimeter after the Boyu transaction. McDonald's monetizes a franchised system through rent and royalty-like economics. These are not just accounting labels. They are the difference between revenue that represents store sales and revenue that represents the parent company's take from a wider system.

Once you keep those layers separate, the Chinese beverage wave stops looking like a single race and starts looking like a set of export experiments:

• Can a value franchise system reproduce China-like density overseas?
• Can a digital coffee chain translate app-driven frequency across markets?
• Can a premium tea brand keep its positioning while scaling store count?
• Can a service-heavy restaurant concept maintain quality outside its home labor and training system?
• Can Chinese supply-chain operators become export infrastructure for the brands?

Mixue is the most extreme version of the first question. It does not need to become premium to matter. It needs to make value repeatable.

That is also why country-level Southeast Asia numbers should be treated carefully. There are secondary estimates for Indonesia and Vietnam, and older market studies have shown those two countries leading Mixue's overseas footprint. But the latest official annual report does not give a country-by-country table; it gives an outside-mainland total and specifically says Indonesia and Vietnam decreased. If a future FoodBud version adds a country table, it should label the source tier and date clearly. A stale country number is worse than no country number, because the official trend has already changed.

7. The McDonald's comparison: stores versus system sales

Mixue's store count beats McDonald's. McDonald's system sales dwarf Mixue's.

That single sentence is the cleanest antidote to a sloppy "largest chain" headline.

McDonald's is the world's most powerful franchised restaurant system by consumer spend. FoodBud's locked McDonald's record carries $139.4 billion of FY2025 system sales / GMV-equivalent scale. It has fewer stores than Mixue, but each store, on average, sits inside a very different ticket, menu, daypart, real estate, and market structure.

Mixue's locked GMV scale is about US$8.10 billion, based on the FY2024 disclosed store-network GMV. That makes Mixue enormous for a value-beverage chain. It does not put Mixue near McDonald's by consumer spend.

This is not a criticism of Mixue. It is a basis correction.

If you are a franchise operator, Mixue's store density is the thing to study. How did it make franchise onboarding, procurement, training, and pricing repeatable enough to run nearly 60,000 locations? If you are a foodservice investor, the question is different. How much of the system's consumer spend becomes parent-company revenue? How much margin can the parent earn on goods and equipment sold to franchisees? How defensible is the supply chain when overseas density is lower?

The answer changes with the basis.

For Mixue:

• Store count tells you network reach.
• GMV / system sales tells you consumer-facing scale.
• Company revenue tells you parent monetization.
• Profit tells you parent economics.
• Market cap / share price tells you market valuation.

None of those numbers should be stacked. None should impersonate the others.

There is another subtle point: Mixue's average unit can be economically meaningful even when it is small in dollar terms.

If you divide the locked FY2024 GMV by the FY2025 store count, you get a rough directional scale-per-store proxy of about US$135,000. That is not a reported single-store sales number. It mixes FY2024 GMV with FY2025 stores, and it should not be used as a franchisee profit estimate. But it is directionally useful because it explains the model's contrast with Western QSR giants. Mixue can have many more units because each unit is smaller, cheaper, and built for high-frequency, low-ticket consumption.

That creates a different network logic. A McDonald's restaurant is a larger box with a broader daypart and higher unit volume. A Starbucks store is a beverage habit plus store environment. A Mixue location can be far smaller, more numerous, and more price-led. The unit is not trying to be a Western flagship cafe. It is a value node in a dense beverage network.

This is why the "largest chain" headline is simultaneously true and misleading. True, because the store count is real. Misleading, because the operating scale per unit is different. A smaller unit can still create huge aggregate power if the network is dense enough and the parent controls enough of the supply chain. But it should not be compared to McDonald's or Starbucks without a basis label.

The more interesting comparison is not "Mixue versus McDonald's, who is bigger?" It is:

What kind of operating system can support a 60,000-store chain when the average consumer price is around one dollar?

That question gets to the heart of why Mixue matters.

8. What public data still cannot tell us

Mixue's disclosure is now much better than it was before the Hong Kong listing, but there are still important blanks.

The annual report gives total store count, mainland versus outside-mainland store count, franchised versus self-operated stores, revenue breakdown, profit, and a qualitative explanation of the overseas optimization. It does not give every number an operator would want.

The missing pieces include:

• country-level store count for each Southeast Asian market in the latest annual report;
• country-level same-store sales or comparable-store sales;
• average unit volume by geography;
• franchisee-level store economics;
• store payback period by market;
• overseas revenue and margin split;
• local supply-chain cost versus China supply-chain cost;
• closures by country beyond the Indonesia / Vietnam directional note;
• mature-store versus new-store cohort performance.

Those gaps matter because Southeast Asia is not one market. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Cambodia differ in income levels, rent, logistics, labor, competitive intensity, and consumer taste. A model can work in one country and break in another. A value price point can be powerful in one market and margin-compressive in another. A dense network can create local procurement power in one geography and remain import-dependent in another.

So the article should not overclaim. We can say Mixue is a massive, franchise-led, supply-chain-monetizing chain with a real Southeast Asia strategy. We can say official overseas store count declined in 2025 while the company optimized Indonesia and Vietnam and entered new markets. We can say the model's exportability depends on reproducing the supply-chain advantage abroad.

We should not say:

• Mixue's Southeast Asia unit economics are proven in every market.
• Indonesia and Vietnam are still growing by store count in 2025.
• FY2025 GMV is known as an absolute number.
• Franchisees are uniformly profitable.
• Store count alone proves category dominance.

This restraint is not weakness. It is exactly why FoodBud can be useful. The public internet rewards certainty. Restaurant operations usually require scoped confidence.

9. The stock lesson: IPO heat is not operating scale

Mixue's Hong Kong listing was one of the signature China consumer IPOs of 2025. It priced at HK$202.50 per share. Shares jumped on debut, and at one point the stock traded far above the IPO price. That made Mixue a market story as well as an operating story.

By July 23, 2026, the stock quote was around HK$214.20 on HKEX, only modestly above the IPO price and far below the 52-week high shown by market-data providers. That does not change the operating reality of nearly 60,000 stores. It does change the way we should talk about the stock.

Market value is not operating scale.

This is especially important for public restaurant companies because the tempting comparisons are everywhere:

• Mixue has more stores than McDonald's.
• Mixue has a lower GMV than McDonald's.
• Mixue has a different revenue basis from Starbucks.
• Mixue's market cap can rise or fall sharply without changing its store count.

Those are four separate facts. A good article keeps them separate.

The IPO market can be useful because it forces disclosure. The prospectus and annual report give us store counts, revenue breakdowns, franchise model language, supply-chain details, and public-market updates. But the stock chart itself is not the operating model.

FoodBud's rule is simple:

Use the listing to get the data. Do not use the stock price as the data.

10. What global operators should learn from Mixue

Mixue matters to global foodservice because it shows a different path to scale.

The Western chain template often starts with brand, menu, real estate, and franchise rights. Mixue's template starts with price and supply chain. The company built the ability to sell a low-priced product at massive scale, then used franchising to distribute the model. Its brand mascot matters. Its menu matters. But without procurement, production, logistics, and standardization, the price promise would break.

That is the lesson for operators watching from outside China.

The obvious takeaway is:

Value can travel.

The more useful takeaway is:

Value travels only when the operating system travels with it.

Southeast Asia is the test case. A dense franchise network can create purchasing power and brand ubiquity. But overseas markets add logistics complexity, franchisee variance, and local adaptation. The 2025 annual report's Indonesia / Vietnam optimization language should be read as an early stress test. Mixue is still expanding internationally, but the company is also learning where the system needs pruning.

If it works, Mixue becomes more than a Chinese beverage chain with a big store count. It becomes a global value-foodservice platform.

If it does not, Mixue will still be a giant China-led system, but the overseas story will need a lower-growth, higher-discipline reading.

Either way, it is not invisible anymore.

Takeaway

Mixue is the world's largest restaurant chain by stores, but not by sales. It is a 59,823-store, >99.9% franchised, value-priced beverage system whose listed parent mainly earns revenue by selling goods, equipment, and services to franchisees. Its Southeast Asia story is real, but the latest official disclosure shows optimization, not a clean straight-line store rush. Its IPO made it visible, but the stock price is not the operating scale.

The correct read is narrower and stronger:

Mixue is a Chinese supply-chain franchisor that made $1 tea globally legible. The store count gets attention; the basis discipline tells you what the company really is.

Data card

Source checklist

• S1: Mixue Group Annual Report 2025, HKEX, released April 23, 2026.
• S1: Mixue Group global offering / prospectus, HKEX, February 2025, for FY2024 store-network GMV RMB58.3B.
• S1 / market data: HKEX quote for 2097.HK as of July 23, 2026.
• FoodBud locked data: Mixue, McDonald's, Starbucks operator records for store counts and scale-basis comparisons.
• Internal links: mixue-series (opens in new tab), china-restaurant-ipo-wave-2026 (opens in new tab), system-sales-vs-revenue-franchisor-gap (opens in new tab), dominos-is-really-a-logistics-company (opens in new tab), who-really-owns-china (opens in new tab).