China's Most Expensive Ice Cream Is Back on Sale at a Tenth of Its Former Price
Zhong Xue Gao, the 'Hermès of ice cream' whose 66-yuan ECCO-branded bar once made it a byword for premium excess, has relaunched on JD after bankruptcy — and shoppers are finding the same brand at single-digit prices, a small case study in what happens to China's premium boom when the mood changes.
Zhong Xue Gao — the Chinese ice cream brand once nicknamed "the Hermès of frozen desserts" — has come back from bankruptcy. The surprise is not that it returned, but the price.
On November 2, a JD flagship store began selling the brand's classic flavors again: light milk, velvet cocoa, a half-milk half-chocolate bar. At launch, the listed prices worked out to roughly 11.5 yuan and 13 yuan per bar — above the "suggested retail prices" the brand's new operators had announced in September, which in turn sat far below the old world. In Zhong Xue Gao's first life, a limited collaboration bar could run 66 yuan, several times the price of a wallet-friendly Mengniu or Yili, and the brand became the emblem of a premium-consumption wave that treated an ice pop as a luxury good. This week, the brand's products were listed on JD at single-digit prices, with three flavors discounted to as little as 7.26 yuan a bar.
The intervening years were brutal. Founded in 2018, Zhong Xue Gao rode China's "consumption upgrade" to national fame, then collapsed almost as fast: a 2022 torch-flambé video meant to prove its ingredients resilient to a lighter backfired into a national argument about food additives, followed by a stream of product-composition controversies, a payment crisis, unpaid suppliers, and eventually bankruptcy proceedings. The company's intangible assets — the brand name above all — were auctioned off, and the relaunching entity is owned by the parent of a different food brand, Royal Tiger.
The new operators face a market that has moved on. China's premium niche has cooled across categories, from boutique coffee to designer blind boxes, while value chains such as Pang Dong Lai and mass-market livestream channels have taken the cultural lead. Ice cream specifically has commoditized: the current best-sellers are cheap, nostalgic and widely distributed, not artisanal.
There is a wrinkle the relaunchers may not have anticipated: even the discounted price drew complaints. Shoppers noticed that the listed bundle prices worked out higher than the September suggested retail prices, and the brand had to respond that promotions and bundles explain the gap — a slightly chastening first week for a brand whose old identity was never having to explain a price at all.
Zhong Xue Gao's second life is thus a neat natural experiment. The brand kept its name, lost its aura, and is now selling the same product into a market that has stopped paying for the story. Whether Chinese consumers buy the ice cream without the mythology — the thing they were never really paying for before — will say a good deal about where the country's consumer mood has landed.