Dong Yuhui's First Product Sold Out in a Day. Then the Shelf Life Made Everyone Ask What's in It

China's most trusted livestream seller is learning that his own brand's first product carries more scrutiny than most. The scrutiny is not hostile, exactly — it is the natural consequence of the trust he spent years building.

Dong Yuhui, the former English teacher turned e-commerce star who left East Buy in 2024, launched his own brand, He Yu Chun Shi, on November 4. Its first product, a mille-crêpe cake, sold out 150,000 orders on day one. Then the trouble started: screenshots of the product listing showed a shelf life of nine months, and the internet's first reaction was to ask what was in it — the phrase "科技与狠活" (technology and harsh tricks), the country's catch-all term for food-additive scaremongering, was doing the work.

The 9-month shelf life is a frozen-food convention: the cake is stored at -18°C, and the listing's fine print says the shelf life applies to unopened, frozen storage with no preservatives. The company's registered entity is Beijing-based, capitalized at 10 million yuan, with Dong as its actual controller through a holding company. The details matter because the brand's launch announcement had leaned on exactly this kind of transparency: Dong said the team had spent three years in consumer goods, shipping more than 700 million orders, and started the brand to fix the problems that had not been solved. Dong responded on livestream on November 10 with a line that has become the story's flashpoint: "-18℃冷冻环境下保质期变长是常识" — that a frozen environment extends shelf life is common sense. "I don't know why this is difficult to understand," he added.

The response has not entirely settled the question. The confusion is a real one: a mille-crêpe cake is a fresh, refrigerated bakery product in the ordinary consumer's mind, and a fresh bakery product's shelf life is measured in days, not months. The phrase that has become the story's shorthand, 科技与狠活 (technology and harsh tricks), is a meme from a food-blogger's exposé videos that has become the country's catch-all term for processed-food suspicion; it was used in China's food-safety debates long before it was pointed at a former English teacher's cake. The brand's defenders point out that the product is a frozen pastry, a different category, and that the company's customer service explained the storage conditions up front. The critics' point is the one Dong's own livestreams trained them to make: the brand's whole pitch is trust, so the information that matters should have been up front, not buried in the fine print. One commenter put it evenly: a seller's job is not just to recommend the product, but to answer for it — and every consumer question deserves a straight answer, not a lecture on common sense.

The scale is not a niche. The brand company was registered in Beijing with 10 million yuan in capital, and Dong's team says it has been working in consumer goods for three years, shipping more than 700 million orders through his existing channels. The first product was always going to sell; the question the shelf-life episode has opened is whether the trust that made it sell can survive the scrutiny that comes with it. Dong's own answer — that frozen shelf life is common sense — is technically correct, and it is also the kind of answer that treats a customer's question as a failure to understand rather than a failure of the brand's own communication.