In 2025, China's Mooncake Market
1.Market Scale: The industry maintains a steady growth momentum, with the market scale expected to reach 32.5 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of about 8%. Production enterprises show obvious regional agglomeration, with Guangdong, Guangxi, Henan and other provinces ranking among the top in the number of related enterprises. There are over 17,000 existing mooncake-related enterprises nationwide. However, some small and medium-sized brands face severe inventory backlogs, in contrast to the stable sales of leading brands.
2.Product Trends: Firstly, healthiness has become the core direction. Sales of low-sugar and sugar-free mooncakes increased by 28.7% and 35.2% year-on-year respectively. Medicinal diet mooncakes have emerged, and products integrating the concept of "homology of medicine and food" such as tangerine peel red bean paste with ganoderma lucidum and polygonatum sibiricum five-nut mooncakes are favored. Secondly, innovative categories have become the main growth drivers. The proportion of ice skin, lava and other categories has increased significantly, with lava mooncakes accounting for 22.3%. Thirdly, cultural and creative categories are growing rapidly. Mooncakes integrated with intangible cultural heritage, local culture and IP co-branding have gained much attention.
3.Regulatory and Consumption Environment: Four government departments have issued regulatory policies to curb "sky-high priced" mooncakes, focusing on supervising boxed mooncakes with a unit price exceeding 500 yuan, while regulating packaging layers and costs. This has promoted the market to return to rationality, and simple packaging has become the mainstream. The growth rate of mid-to-high-end products that previously relied on luxurious packaging has slowed down. Meanwhile, 72.3% of consumers are willing to pay a premium for mooncakes with traditional cultural elements, and the national trend continues to boost consumption.
4.Channels and Production: On the sales side, online channels and instant retail have achieved significant growth. Unsold mooncakes after the festival are digested through platform promotions, employee internal purchases and other methods, and some gift boxes have adjusted their positioning to move towards snacks. On the production side, leading enterprises have realized flexible production relying on big data, dynamically adjusting production capacity according to orders, while small and medium-sized brands face greater inventory pressure due to the lack of accurate prediction.
5.Competition Pattern: The brand effect is prominent. Well-known brands such as Guangzhou Restaurant and Maxim's, as well as leading enterprises with large-scale production and omni-channel layout like Suzhou Daoxiangcun, have shown stable performance. In contrast, small and medium-sized brands lacking characteristics have low market recognition and face great sales pressure, leading to further intensified industry differentiation.
