On July 24, 2026, the inaugural outlet of HAIDILAO's new sub-brand, "Fresh Fort," flung open its doors at the Wuhan Huafa Zhongcheng Commercial Plaza. This move follows a tentative foray into the burger segment back in 2024 via the "Xiao Hai Ai Zha" label, and it marks the hotpot behemoth's first foray into the category under a fully-fledged, independent brand identity. With an average ticket of 33 yuan, freshly grilled beef burgers starting at 19.9 yuan, and a sprawling western-style menu nearing 50 stock-keeping units, Fresh Fort is a calculated bet reflecting both a strategic hunger for a second growth curve and a collective unease among China's dining titans as their core businesses plateau.
The "Red Pomegranate" Blossoms: Navigating Growth Ceilings and Diversifying the Portfolio
The primary catalyst behind Fresh Fort's launch is the looming ceiling above the company's core hotpot operations. According to the 2025 financial report, HAIDILAO logged a full-year revenue of 43.225 billion yuan, a modest 1.1% uptick, while net profit slipped by 14.0% to 4.042 billion yuan. Core operating profit followed suit, declining 13.3% to 5.403 billion yuan. Table turnover rates, once a staggering five-plus times daily before the pandemic, have since cooled to 3.9 turns. These three signals—tepid revenue growth, shrinking profits, and pressured table turnover—collectively paint a clear picture of waning momentum in the hotpot segment.
It is within this context that HAIDILAO inaugurated its "Red Pomegranate Plan" in August 2024, a strategic initiative designed to wean the company off its sole reliance on hotpot through multi-brand incubation. By the close of 2025, HAIDILAO had seeded sub-brands across 20 diverse segments, from seafood food courts and sushi to western-style light fare, with revenue from these ancillary restaurants surging 214.63% to 1.521 billion yuan. Fresh Fort is the latest offspring of this ambitious plan.
Why Burgers? Tapping a Booming Market
The allure of the burger market is data-driven. From a modest 6 billion yuan in 2022, China's burger market ballooned to 32 billion yuan in 2024 and hit 44.5 billion yuan in 2025, with broader western-style fast food reaching a staggering 499.65 billion yuan. As the top category in fast food, burgers' inherent standardizability and scalability make them an irresistible target for cross-industry players scouting for auxiliary ventures.
This isn't a leap of faith for HAIDILAO; it's an evolution. The company initially dipped its toes in 2024 with the "Xiao Hai Ai Zha" fried chicken sub-brand, progressively expanding its repertoire to include burgers, pizza, and coffee. By late 2025, that label evolved into "Xiao Hai Ai Zha·Hiburger," pivoting its identity towards burgers. Fresh Fort's standalone debut signals that the group has validated the market's potential and is ready to commit fully.
Product-wise, Fresh Fort aims to carve out a niche with its "fresh" proposition in an otherwise homogenous landscape. The brand sources Angus beef delivered the same day, which is then sliced, seared, and grilled fresh in an open kitchen to craft 130-gram thick patties. Its slogan, "Others sell burgers, we sell fresh burgers," explicitly targets the industry's reliance on pre-made frozen patties. The menu features six fresh beef burgers and two chicken options, with combo meals pairing fries and soda priced from 19.9 to 41.9 yuan.
Yet Fresh Fort's grander vision extends beyond burgers. The menu also encompasses pizza, pasta, salads, sides, desserts, gelato, coffee, mocktails, and craft beer, totaling nearly 50 SKUs. This expansive lineup aims to cover the full western-style fast-food spectrum, catering to everything from breakfast to dinner and solo diners to group sharing.
It's worth noting that Fresh Fort isn't HAIDILAO's sole pawn in the burger arena. The pre-existing "Xiao Hai Ai Zha·Hiburger" also orbits around burgers, creating notable product overlap. For instance, a double cheese beef burger combo is priced at 41.9 yuan at Fresh Fort, versus 39 yuan at Xiao Hai Ai Zha. Industry observers view this as an internal "horse race" mechanism, where two sub-brands compete within the same lane to determine the superior business model.
Strategically, Fresh Fort exemplifies the group's transition in the "post-Zhang Yong era." In January 2026, founder Zhang Yong reassumed the CEO helm, and by April, veteran Yang Lijuan returned to oversee the "Red Pomegranate Plan." This trilogy of moves—a founder's return, a seasoned lieutenant's comeback, and an accelerated multi-brand push—underscores the group's urgency to pivot operations and open new growth avenues as its core business stagnates. Whether Fresh Fort can emerge as that elusive second growth curve is not just a test for a single label but a litmus test for the entire "Red Pomegranate Plan."
Navigating an Epic Contest: Fresh Fort's Challenges and Clinchers
The competitive landscape Fresh Fort enters is brutally arduous. The Chinese burger market in 2026 resembles a "Warring States" era. Incumbent giants hold formidable advantages. Red Can Big Data reveals that leading burger chains collectively operate over 50,000 stores: Huashi Lai boasts 19,000, Tastien has exceeded 12,000, KFC surpasses 13,000, and McDonald's tops 8,000. These players possess mature supply chains, strong brand equity, and entrenched distribution networks in lower-tier cities.
The influx of cross-industry players further intensifies the fray. Huang Ji Huang, Yum China's braised-pot brand, now serves "Huang Ji Huang Guo Qi Burgers" at many branches, featuring Chinese-style, hand-made, oven-fresh creations at 14 and 19 yuan. Pizza Hut has opened 150 independent "Pizza Hut Burger" stores within a year. Coffee label M Stand has also introduced artisanal burgers. Wendy's, America's third-largest burger chain, announced its re-entry into China in the first half of 2026, planning up to 1,000 restaurants over the next decade. Dairy Queen is also venturing into burgers, and bakery brand "Stone's Oven" has launched a burger sub-brand. The rush is on from all corners.
In such a crowded arena, Fresh Fort confronts three major hurdles. The first is internal cannibalization. The significant overlap in products, pricing, and target demographics between Fresh Fort and "Xiao Hai Ai Zha·Hiburger" results in de facto internal competition. Both sub-brands, operating under HAIDILAO's umbrella and sharing similar supply chain and operational resources, risk depleting each other's momentum. Analyst Lin Yue points out this is a deliberate "horse race" to weed out inferior models, but the costs are tangible: resource dilution, brand confusion, and reduced synergy. Alarmingly, the two "Xiao Hai Ai Zha" stores in Wuhan have already been marked as permanently closed, a cautionary tale for Fresh Fort.
The second hurdle is the precariousness of its differentiation strategy. While the "freshly made, fresh burger" positioning is clear, its execution is fraught with risk. "Freshness" places intense demands on supply chain timeliness and standardization at the outlet level. Maintaining the rigor of same-day beef delivery and on-site preparation may be feasible for a single store, but scaling up raises significant questions about consistency. Meanwhile, the near-50 SKU multi-category strategy, while enriching consumer scenarios, dramatically complicates back-of-house production, inflates labor costs, and adds operational intricacies. More SKUs require more staff and a higher skill level for collaboration. This model needs robust foot traffic to justify the overhead; insufficient volume could lead to idle resources and erode profitability. Spatial design, with many single-seat tables, may also clash with the shareable nature of pizza and other multi-person categories. The current expansion strategy hasn't yet harmonized with store layout and kitchen flow.
The third challenge is the cross-industry brand chasm. HAIDILAO's brand equity—its robust supply chain, financial muscle, and operational expertise—is an undeniable asset for Fresh Fort. However, this halo won't automatically translate into consumer trust. Customers perceive HAIDILAO through the lens of "hotpot" and "service," not necessarily "burgers." Franchising expert Li Weihua highlights that cross-industry entrants face unique obstacles that native burger brands don't, including supply chain adjustments, product R&D, and the heavy lift of consumer brand recognition. Fresh Fort will need to painstakingly build trust from the ground up for "burgers made by HAIDILAO"—a slow and challenging process.
From a pricing standpoint, Fresh Fort's average spend of 33 yuan places it in the mid-tier. This band faces direct headwinds from international behemoths like McDonald's and KFC, while also being squeezed from below by budget-friendly domestic players like Huashi Lai and Tastien. In an era of pronounced consumption downgrading, consumers are increasingly value-conscious, and whether Fresh Fort's "fresh" pitch can justify its premium remains an open question.
Sector-wide, the window of opportunity in the burger market is narrowing. First- and second-tier cities are saturated, and while lower-tier markets hold growth potential, the competition there is already fierce. The entry window is slamming shut, and the true knockout phase is just beginning. Fresh Fort is entering at this juncture as an independent brand—a gamble with equally weighted risk and reward. A research note from Huaxing Securities observes that China's western-style fast-food market is in a phase of simultaneous rapid expansion and intensified rivalry, making it tough for Fresh Fort to build a sustainable edge. The firm has kept its buy rating and earnings forecast for HAIDILAO but trimmed its target price by 18% to HK$14.50. This cautious stance from the capital markets reflects a wait-and-see attitude regarding the short-term impact of HAIDILAO's multi-brand play.
Reflecting on the history of China's dining industry, successful multi-brand ventures are the exception, not the rule. Most cross-industry forays have either stumbled on the brand cognition gap or been weighed down by operational dilution. Fresh Fort's birth is a bold attempt born of growth anxiety, but bravery doesn't guarantee success. The core question it must answer is this: in a market long dominated by giants, can a hotpot purveyor, armed with a "fresh burger" angle, genuinely carve out a winning path? The verdict won't be found in analyst reports or capital flows. It will be written in the queues at the next Fresh Fort outlet, in the repeat purchase rates, and in the unit economics post-scale-up. For HAIDILAO, Fresh Fort is more than a new label—it's the touchstone for the "Red Pomegranate Plan," and the market is watching to see if it can shine.
This article was compiled with the assistance of AI tools for market data aggregation and supplementary analytical perspectives.