沃集鲜开辟了一条月饼新赛道

This article highlights Walmart’s private label Great Value’s all-new 2025 mooncake lineup, which breaks long-held public perceptions of mooncakes as overly sweet, excessively packaged, or gimmicky in flavor, and helps everyday consumers identify mooncake options better suited for regular consumption.

1. Rejecting attention-grabbing novelty flavors, the collection uses widely popular, approachable fillings including kale, turmeric, matcha raw chocolate, chargrilled beef with perilla, milk skin, and wild mushrooms. All ingredients are sourced from their core premium origins, such as Xiangtan lotus seeds, Xuanwei ham, 15-year aged Xinhui tangerine peel, and Black Thorn and Musang King durian from Malaysia. The line also adopts upgraded production techniques including HPP high-pressure sterilization and spherical charred pastry crust, delivering more reliable texture and product quality.

2. The series features diverse packaging designs spanning oil painting aesthetics, Chinese traditional style, regional cultural motifs, and popular IP collaborations. It also includes more than 10 budget-friendly SKUs priced under RMB 20, containing 2–3 pieces per box, with some individual pieces weighing only 25 grams to help consumers avoid excess calorie intake and food waste. Beyond festival gifting, the products are suitable for breakfast, or as a small snack with tea or coffee during afternoon tea. Now available across all Walmart online and offline channels, the cloud ham and wild mushroom mooncake variant has already sold over 20,000 units.

Great Value’s innovative mooncake launch offers a replicable end-to-end playbook for festive food brands, covering product R&D, brand positioning, and use case expansion, with strong practical reference value.

1. On the R&D front, brands should avoid two types of ineffective innovation: first, traditional overly sweet recipes misaligned with modern health priorities; second, attention-grabbing novelty flavors that fail to drive repeat purchases. Instead, brands can stay anchored to a clear brand philosophy, sourcing premium ingredients from their core origins and upgrading processing techniques to balance health benefits and taste. They should also build a systematic creative reuse mechanism, transferring market-validated successful flavors to new categories—for example, extending the popular matcha raw chocolate flavor, which went viral during the Dragon Boat Festival, to the mooncake line, sharply reducing innovation trial-and-error costs.

2. On the brand operation front, brands should capitalize on two major consumer trends: first, rising demand for emotional value and cultural aesthetics, which calls for packaging integrating diverse aesthetic styles and distinctive IPs; second, the broader shift of food products back to their core edible value, which creates opportunities for low-sugar, portion-controlled, cost-effective simple-pack products. This approach allows brands to break out of the homogeneous competition in the single gifting scenario, expand into daily consumption occasions such as breakfast and afternoon tea, and build differentiated positioning around product quality.

The positive market response to Great Value’s mooncake line points to new growth directions for online and offline sellers of mooncakes and other festive foods, flags potential operational risks from outdated strategies, and offers actionable practical guidance.

1. Proactively mitigate operational risks: Relying solely on gimmicky flavors such as snail noodle or bullfrog to drive traffic, or over-depending on high-end gift box sales for gifting scenarios, makes it hard to build repeat purchases, leaves sellers vulnerable to fluctuations in gifting demand, and results in weak risk resistance.

2. Capture clear growth opportunities: Consumer demand for mooncakes is shifting back to the product’s core edible function, leaving a notable market gap for low-sugar, small-portion products suited for daily use. Sellers can curate selections around popular health-focused ingredients and regionally distinctive ingredients, pair them with aesthetically designed lightweight packaging, and launch small-portion products in the accessible price tier around RMB 20 to meet consumer demand for items to pair with tea, pair with coffee, or eat for breakfast.

3. Adopt replicable operational tactics: Attach importance to user feedback on social media, for example by developing multi-flavor small-portion products in response to consumer requests. Sellers can also partner with culturally relevant IPs and regional specialty products to diversify their product assortments and boost user favorability.

Great Value’s mooncake innovation model points to new product design directions and long-term commercial partnership opportunities for food processing factories, especially those focused on baked goods and festive food products.

1. On production design, align with downstream customers’ new demands: For raw materials, build stable supply chains for premium ingredients sourced from core origins, connecting with well-recognized quality ingredients such as Xuanwei ham, Xinhui tangerine peel, Xiangtan lotus seeds, and Malaysian durian. For processing techniques, pursue cross-domain technology upgrades, for example applying HPP high-pressure sterilization—originally used in the juice sector—to preserve freshness in durian fillings, and developing spherical charred pastry crusts and individual aluminum foil packaging to support consumer demand for reheating products at home, balancing health attributes and taste. For specification design, adjust production lines to support small-portion simple-pack products with individual pieces around 25 grams and 2–3 pieces per box, to fit daily consumption scenarios.

2. On commercial partnerships, proactively engage with large supermarket and retail chains to participate in their festive product supply chain planning, which often starts a year in advance, locking in stable long-cycle ingredient orders through frontloaded supply chain arrangements. At the same time, support customers’ creative reuse needs by rapidly adapting mature, proven flavors to different seasonal product categories, to improve production economies of scale.

Great Value’s innovative exploration in the mooncake category reflects emerging development trends in the festive food industry, and highlights real client pain points and potential service opportunities for all types of service providers.

1. Recognize clear industry trends: Festive foods are moving beyond their single gifting attribute to penetrate daily consumption scenarios. Health orientation, smaller portions, strong aesthetic design, and premium quality are clear product upgrade directions. The industry as a whole is abandoning outdated strategies of gimmick-driven marketing and excessive packaging, shifting to a refined operation stage marked by frontloaded supply chain planning and systematic creative reuse.

2. Build service offerings around client pain points: First, provide origin traceability and matchmaking services for brand and retail clients, identifying high-quality ingredients aligned with health and mainstream consumption trends. Second, offer cross-domain process technology migration services, customizing and adapting mature freshness-preservation, sterilization, and packaging technologies from other food sectors to meet baked goods production needs. Third, provide user insight services, capturing consumer feedback and preferences on social media to help clients screen reusable successful creative ideas and reduce new product trial-and-error costs.

Great Value’s mooncake innovation case offers actionable practical reference for retail and e-commerce platforms in festive category operation, merchant management, and strategic guidance.

1. Steer the market away from unhealthy operational trends: Proactively guide merchants to move away from distorted practices such as exorbitantly priced mooncakes, excessive packaging, and gimmicky flavors used purely to drive traffic. Prevent mooncakes from becoming hollow symbols of gifting transactions, and guide merchants to return focus to the food’s core edible value, fostering a healthy category consumption ecosystem.

2. Clarify merchant recruitment and operational priorities: Prioritize onboarding mooncake products suited for daily consumption scenarios, such as low-sugar, small-portion, simple-pack SKUs at the accessible price point around RMB 20. Introduce premium products featuring regional specialty ingredients, popular health-focused elements, and high-quality origin-sourced raw materials, as well as distinctive products with cultural IPs, hit film and television IPs, and standout design, to meet diverse consumer demands across scenarios including breakfast, afternoon tea, and small casual gatherings.

3. Optimize platform operation mechanisms: Draw on the frontloaded supply chain approach to guide merchants to plan festive product assortments in advance. Open up channels to collect user demand feedback from product review sections and social platforms, enabling merchants to respond quickly to consumer needs. At the same time, encourage merchants to reuse market-validated successful creative concepts, to improve the overall success rate of new products across the platform.

Great Value’s practice in the mooncake category reflects multiple new trends in private label development among domestic retailers and the transformation of the festive food industry, carrying high industry research value.

1. In terms of new industry trends, first, there is an obvious value regression trend in festive foods. The mooncake category, which was long tied to gifting attributes and plagued by distorted issues including sky-high priced gift boxes and empty circulation of gift vouchers, is returning to its core edible attribute, with lightweight, daily-use, health-oriented products opening up new consumption space. Second, large retailers’ private labels have already formed systematic innovation mechanisms: staying anchored to a clear brand philosophy (such as “simplicity for freshness” for Great Value), sourcing ingredients from core origins, using process upgrades to balance health benefits and taste, adapting to new consumption scenarios, ensuring quality control through frontloaded supply chains, and reducing trial-and-error costs through creative reuse, to build differentiated competitive positioning.

2. At the business model level, this systematic product innovation mechanism has been validated by the market, supporting Walmart in delivering consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth and a clear recovery in offline store foot traffic, making it a new benchmark for retail industry transformation. It also provides a researchable practical path for the festive food industry to break away from path dependence and explore new growth curves, demonstrating that in-depth supply chain and user insight-driven innovation is the core competitive moat that is difficult to replicate.