Lao Taimen Founder Chen Qingsong: Amid the restaurant closures, breakfast is the next trillion-yuan opportunity

How does Lao Taimen’s multi-brand strategy break the breakfast market dilemma?

A major reshuffle in the catering industry! By 2025, over 3 million stores will quietly exit the market, with traditional snack businesses fighting fiercely in a red ocean, while giants dominate the dumpling, wonton, and noodle sectors, leaving countless brands in survival crises. Yet, the colder the winter, the more golden the opportunity! By 2026, the national specialty snack market is expected to exceed 1.0384 trillion yuan, with a growth rate of over 10%—breakfast, with its inherent advantages of necessity, high frequency, and strong repurchase, has become a super trend of growth against the odds!

△ Chen Qingsong, founder of Lao Taimen Group

On March 25, the 2026 China Catering Industry Festival and the 35th HCC Global Catering Industry Expo, co-hosted by the World Chinese Restaurant Association and Hongcan Network, were held at the Hangzhou International Expo Center. At the “2026 China Catering Industry Conference,” Chen Qingsong, founder of Lao Taimen Group, stated that Lao Taimen is breaking through with a multi-brand matrix + precise three determinations and one push strategy, deeply cultivating four differentiated brands to firmly seize the trillion-yuan breakfast market:

First, Lao Taimen Soup Dumplings adopts the traditional breakfast snack store model, focusing on the breakfast sector and not venturing into lunch or dinner categories; location selection follows a benchmarking principle, laying out in areas where peers are concentrated, and pricing for traffic-generating and mutually beneficial products to create a quality-price advantage.

Second, Xijiangnan focuses on traditional steamed dumplings, choosing store locations in areas with high breakfast consumption, pricing competitively with a friendly price of 1 yuan each to ensure delicious and affordable offerings, while stores can operate in both morning and afternoon time slots, breaking the time constraints of traditional dumpling shops.

Third, Panda Dumplings creates a factory-style open kitchen shop model, focusing on brown sugar and yellow sugar steamed buns, with locations benchmarking against cake shops and surrounding areas, utilizing both retail and group purchase channels, achieving a 60% gross profit margin with daily sales exceeding 30,000.

Fourth, Rongchangde integrates local culinary characteristics from Wuhan, featuring heavy oil shao mai, with store locations also situated next to breakfast competitors, directly facing market competition, and enhancing the average transaction value through a combination sales strategy, standing out in the highly competitive breakfast market of Wuhan.

Fifth, the winter is not the end but the starting point for reshaping the landscape. While most people are caught in a red ocean, Lao Taimen has already carved out a breakthrough path in the breakfast sector with precise positioning, differentiated brands, and efficient models.

The demand is unending, and breakfast remains evergreen! The next gold mining opportunity in catering is hidden in the first meal of the day!

Author: Hongcan Editorial Department