Enjoying the moon and eating mooncakes is one of the traditional customs of the Mid-Autumn Festival. As this year’s “Mooncake War” came to an end, major e-commerce platforms and time-honored brands also revealed their sales data. After analyzing the reports, we found consumers’ demands for moon cakes had returned to personal consumption rather than gifting. Here are our findings.

I. Mooncakes in bulk are demonstrating inelastic demand:

Xing Hua Lou:

The total sales of mooncakes increased by around 5% over the same period last year.

Sales of mooncakes in bulk reached more than 15 million.

Xinya Cantonese Restaurant:

The Nanjing Road store recently sold an average of 750,000 mooncakes in bulk per day.

Tmall Supermarket:

Mooncake sales increased by 200%, and the sales of mooncakes in bulk rose by 235%.

The post-90s generation (people born in the 1990s) were the main force among the consumers.

Ding Dong Grocery:

Small mooncakes with simple and environmentally-friendly packaging were more popular. The sales volume of mooncakes in bulk was 5 times that of gift boxes.

(Image by Cheng Qi and Hua Ying/Eastday.com)

II. Both traditional and new flavors are popular:

Xing Hua Lou:

The most popular flavors are still the four traditional ones: bean paste, milk coconut, lotus paste, and five nuts.

Ding Dong Grocery:

The top sellers are:

Zhi Wei Guan’s rose and bean paste Cantonese-style mooncakes (each weighing 30 grams)

Sheng Da Cheng’s fresh meat mooncakes (two in each box, weighing 60 grams)

Zhi Wei Guan’s egg yolk and lotus paste Cantonese-style mooncakes (each weighing 30 grams)

Hema Fresh:

In addition to the traditional fresh meat mooncakes, flavors such as creamy custard and salmon were also among the best-selling.

Tmall Supermarket:

In cities where cold-chain delivery is available within one hour, the sales of ice-skin mooncakes and ice-cream mooncakes doubled.

(Image by Cheng Qi and Hua Ying/Eastday.com)

III. Freshly baked moon cakes are more popular.

Hema Fresh:

The sales of Hema Workshop’s freshly baked moon cakes (with two or four in each box) far exceeded last year.

Xinya Cantonese Restaurant:

The Nanjing Road store recently sold more than 200,000 freshly baked mooncakes of various flavors every day.

In addition, on Tmall, fillings of the moon cakes (used for home preparation) in some flagship stores of time-honored brands in Shanghai were also among the top sellers.

(Image by Cheng Qi and Hua Ying/Eastday.com)