A 500-Yuan Fake Licence Put a Garage BBQ Joint on China's Delivery Apps
An unlicensed barbecue stall operating out of a Liuzhou garage — its food permit bought for 500 yuan from a paperwork agent — headlined CCTV's latest exposé of 'ghost takeout', after a Guangxi audit flagged more than 5,000 suspicious merchant records; in April, regulators fined seven delivery platforms a combined 3.597 billion yuan over the same problem.
A barbecue stall listed on a delivery app as "Tonight BBQ" in Liuzhou, Guangxi, had everything a hungry customer looks for online: a properly formatted food-business licence with a tidy seal, a listed address, a working storefront. What it did not have was a licence that actually existed. This week CCTV used the shop to show how "ghost takeout" — restaurants that exist mainly as an entry on a platform — keeps slipping past the gates of China's app-dominated delivery market.
The stall, regulators found, was running out of a garage in a residential building. Its owner had previously run a fruit and vegetable shop, abandoned it, and turned to barbecue without ever obtaining a food-business qualification. He paid an agent 500 yuan to "handle" the paperwork, uploaded nothing himself, and went live on the platform anyway — trading for four months before inspectors caught up with him and shut him down.
The Liuzhou case grew out of a province-wide audit. Guangxi's market regulators matched every merchant's publicised credentials on delivery platforms against the official food-licence database, item by item, and more than 5,000 anomalous records surfaced — shops whose permits looked immaculate and could not be found anywhere in the system.
"Ghost takeaway" is the industry's name for merchants with no dine-in premises, who rent or borrow licences, use false addresses, forge photographs of a storefront, or dress themselves up as high-rated shops before entering a platform. For customers the app experience is indistinguishable: the licence scans cleanly, the photos look professional, the rating glows.
The stakes are not hypothetical. In April, the market regulator imposed penalties on seven e-commerce platforms in the "ghost takeaway" series of cases — fines and confiscations totalling 3.597 billion yuan, with orders to rectify how they vet merchants. State media's commentary at the time put the principle in one line: platforms "cannot pocket the profit while refusing to guard the door". A widely read post by a commentator argued that the public was aiming at the wrong culprit: the small workshops are the last link in a chain where the order itself is a commodity — a customer believes they are buying from a 4.9-rated cake shop with glossy photographs, while the order is quietly resold to whichever kitchen will actually cook it.
China runs the largest online food-delivery market in the world, and the volume is exactly why the loophole persists: verification is delegated to the platforms themselves, whose growth depends on supply. The Liuzhou stall is closed, and Guangxi is still working through its 5,000 flagged records — but whether gatekeeping changes without another multi-billion-yuan bill arriving is the question the case leaves open.