Zhao Yiming Snacks Pledges Tenfold Compensation Over Short-Weight Scandal
Mingming Henmang, the group behind China's biggest bulk-snack chains, has apologized for stores short-weighing customers and pledged tenfold compensation, daily scale audits and a nationwide weighing-monitoring system — a formal retreat after regulators began inspecting a boom industry built on the price of a gram.
The sign outside says everything is a bargain; the scale decides what you actually pay. That arithmetic is the whole business model of China's bulk-snack emporiums — cavernous stores where candy, dried tofu and beef jerky are scooped from bins and sold by weight — and on Monday the country's biggest operator was forced to apologize for rigging it.
Mingming Henmang, the group behind the Zhao Yiming Snacks and Snacks Very Busy chains, issued a formal response to a run of scale-fraud allegations: a special compensation fund that will pay customers in advance, a tenfold price-difference payout for anyone short-weighed — up from the industry's usual threefold — daily calibration checks, weight records kept on file, and a nationwide monitoring system streaming data from every store scale. The group said it had also reported its rectification measures to market regulators. (Beijing Daily's report of the pledge)
The apology closed a week in which the discount-snack sector's core promise — more, for less — collided with the instrument it depends on. In Hebei, a customer who picked up four pieces of beef jerky was charged as if for 64.5 yuan worth; a re-weigh at the market came to 17.2. In Henan, a 111-yuan bill dropped to 64.8 the moment the customer asked for the scale to be checked again. Regulators in Baotou, Yuncheng, Yancheng and other cities launched special inspections of the big chains, and the rival brand Haoxianglai was reduced to insisting it has "zero tolerance" for short weight. (Beijing Daily's roundup of the cases)
For an international reader, the scene needs one piece of context: the bulk-snack store is one of the retail phenomena of the past three years in China, a format that grew through the consumption downturn precisely because it feels honest — cheap, cheerful, price-per-gram visible on the shelf label. One flagship "snack kingdom" in Changsha draws as many as 60,000 visitors a day across 13,000 square meters and 35,000 products, with queues that can run 90 minutes. (The store, as charted on Baidu) Volume is the margin, so the scale is the whole trust contract. "Customers come to a chain for standardization and peace of mind," as a Beijing Daily commentary put it, "and to pay less for more — not to be cheated by the gram." (The commentary)
This site followed the regulatory crackdown last week, when the four-pieces-of-beef-jerky case went viral and provincial regulators began naming the chains. What changed on Monday is that the sector's leader stopped contesting the narrative and started paying for it: the tenfold pledge converts an outrage into a price, and puts the group's own money behind every accurate weighing. A mainland-media commentary welcomed the mechanism while noting the obvious — "fair trade begins with an accurate scale," and no compensation scheme works if customers stop walking in. (Dawan News's commentary)
The fund takes effect immediately; whether the queues in Changsha treat it as a fix or a confession will show up, gram by gram, in the sales figures.