Mixue Ice Cream & Tea

• 1. Honey Snow Ice City

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  Mixue Ice Cream & Tea was running almost 60,000 stores at the end of 2025. No other food-service chain in the world had more. Its Chinese name, Mìxuě Bīngchéng, translates as honey snow ice city, and English speakers are told to pronounce it ME-shweh. The company is a Chinese multinational that sells ice cream and tea-based drinks, and it sells them at low prices. A scale like that raises obvious questions. How did a cheap soft-serve cone turn into a global footprint? What kind of business structure can put so many shops on so many streets? And what did people find when they looked closely at what happens inside them?

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• 2. Street Stall Failures

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  In June 1997, a student named Zhang Hongchao was studying at Henan University of Economics and Law in Zhengzhou. With a loan from his grandmother, he opened a shaved-ice stall. Its early success convinced him to expand, and in 1999 he opened a second stand called Mixue Bingcheng. Then inexperience caught up with him. Zhang closed three stores in a little more than a year. After the third closure, he traveled to Hefei to sell tanghulu, and that venture failed too. In spring 1999, he returned to Zhengzhou to start a new cold drink shop. That shop was also demolished. The failures of these street stalls were later attributed to poor locations and ongoing urbanization. The first successful Mixue Ice Cream & Tea store would not open until 2003, after six relocations.

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• 3. The Franchise Engine

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  Around 2005 or 2006, Mixue introduced soft-serve ice cream at a very low price. It quickly became a best-seller and the company's first signature product. In 2007, after opening a new ice cream shop, Mixue began franchising. The following year it created Mixue Ice Cream & Tea Trading Co., Ltd. to manage the growing network of franchise stores. Most locations are still franchised today. The company earns a large share of its revenue by supplying franchisees with ingredients, equipment, and packaging. Soft-serve and milk tea remain the heart of a menu built around low-priced items. In the first nine months of 2023, Mixue sold approximately 442 million ice cream cones in China. The company also reports reach beyond the counter. In 2022 it bought over 9,000 tonnes of tea, benefiting around 50,000 tea farmers. It supported over 11,000 franchisees and generated more than 500,000 jobs. That same year it launched a scholarship program across five universities in Henan.

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• 4. Mascot And Milestones

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  In November 2018, Mixue launched a new brand mascot called Snow King. Between the 24th and the 26th of May 2019, the company hosted an ice cream music festival at Opalala Water Park in Zhengzhou. It drew over 30,000 visitors. On the 24th of June 2020, Mixue celebrated the opening of its 10,000th store in Yuanyang County, in Xinxiang, Henan. The chain had grown from a loan-funded stall to five figures in store count. That same year, a branch at Cihampelas Walk in Bandung brought the brand to Indonesia.

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• 5. Crossing Borders

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  On the 5th of September 2018, a store opened in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was Mixue's first step outside China. The real expansion came in 2022, when stores opened in Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Laos, and Myanmar. By the end of that year, the chain had also entered South Korea and Japan. In February 2023, Mixue debuted in Australia with a store in Sydney. Openings in Melbourne and Brisbane followed. Each new market added to a map that was still growing when the company turned toward the stock exchange in Hong Kong.

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• 6. Going Public

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  On the 3rd of March 2025, Mixue Group went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It was then the largest initial public offering the city had seen that year. The company sold 17 million shares at HK$202.5 each. That raised about HK$3.45 billion, or roughly US$444 million at the time. Investors responded eagerly, and the shares rose by about 40-47% on the first day of trading. Mixue Group, the parent company of the chain, now answers to public shareholders. Within months, its attention shifted to a city far from Zhengzhou, where plans for a New York store began in September 2025.

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• 7. American Debut

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  On the 20th of December 2025, Mixue opened its first American store in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Four days later, two more stores opened in New York City, in Herald Square and in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Reviewers prominently noted the chain's low prices. They also noted that items were constantly sold out. Those long lines were a new kind of attention for a brand that had grown up on cheap soft-serve. Closer scrutiny at home had already shown a less flattering picture.

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• 8. Food Safety Questions

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  In December 2022, journalists from The Beijing News applied for jobs at two Mixue stores in Nanjing. They were not required to sign labor contracts. They also discovered that "discarded" ingredients and "corner-cutting measures" were being used. The story was reported in March 2023. As of the 14th of March 2023, complaints on the Black Cat Complaint Platform had reached 4,435, most of them about food safety. In March 2025, the "3·15" program of Hubei Economic Television reported on a kitchen in Yichang. The report described unrefrigerated, sliced fruit left over from the previous day and improper storage of ingredients. It also described insects swarming around the lids of milk tea cups on the work surface. That report landed in the same month the company's shares began trading in Hong Kong.

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