11个城市营收增长超50%！柠宝节成为柠季逆势增长的核心观察窗口

This article shares the growth experience of leading hand-shaken lemon tea brand Ningji, which carved out a niche in the new tea beverage sector and achieved counter-cyclical growth via end-to-end AI-powered digital transformation. Key takeaways include:

1. Key growth milestones: Founded in 2021 as a 3-square-meter street stall in Changsha, Ningji generated over ¥300,000 in revenue in its first month, and built a full-stack digital intelligence system from scratch within 5 years. During its 5th annual "Ningbao Festival" promotion in 2026, the brand recorded a total GMV of ¥70 million across its mainland China stores over 9 days, representing a 27.5% month-on-month increase. Its total member base exceeded 23.8 million, with a 52% month-on-month acceleration in membership growth. These strong results stand out against an industry downturn that saw a net reduction of 30,000 new tea beverage stores nationwide in 2025.

2. Actionable takeaways: Digital transformation is not an empty marketing gimmick—it delivers tangible profit growth for businesses. Early franchisees that adopted the system identified a hidden off-peak window between 3PM and 5PM through data analysis, and boosted monthly profit by 15% after adjusting staff scheduling accordingly. This data-driven approach to daily operations optimization can be replicated by all offline retail and food service businesses.

This article offers multi-dimensional actionable insights for consumer brands, especially new tea beverage players:

1. Brand marketing: Ningji has evolved its annual "Ningbao Festival" from a generic promotional event into a core brand asset and cultural symbol. The campaign delivers low-cost customer acquisition, reactivates dormant members, boosts franchisee profitability, and strengthens customer brand loyalty, ultimately driving a 27.5% counter-cyclical GMV growth amid an industry downturn—this approach is highly replicable for other brands.

2. Capability building: As the new tea beverage industry enters an era of cutthroat competition for existing market share, most brands only use AI for isolated, single-point tasks. By contrast, Ningji has built a closed-loop end-to-end digital intelligence system covering site selection, store operations and upstream supply chain, unlocking cost reduction and efficiency gains via algorithm optimization. It has also established self-owned perfume lemon plantations to secure raw material supply and consistent quality from the source, strengthening its long-term brand moat.

3. Product positioning: Ningji started by focusing on the highly segmented hand-shaken lemon tea category and dedicated itself to category excellence, which aligns with the ongoing trend of consumer market segmentation.

This article outlines key takeaways for aspiring tea beverage business sellers:

1. Opportunity and risk outlook: The new tea beverage industry has entered a phase of存量 competition, with a net reduction of nearly 30,000 stores across the sector in 2025, meaning competition is extremely intense. However, Ningji has recorded over 50% revenue growth in 11 Chinese cities, thanks to its digital intelligence system that delivers stable profitability for franchisees and far stronger risk resilience than average brands.

2. Support for franchisees: Ningji offers a mature intelligent site selection system that recommends locations based on franchisee requirements and generates professional assessment reports including商圈 analysis and operational forecasts, reducing the risk of poor location choices. It also runs a transparent 8% franchise subsidy scheme distributed via digital systems to protect franchisee interests.

3. Operational best practices: AI tools deliver tangible cost reduction and efficiency gains for stores. For example, AI-powered food delivery operation assistants cut ineffective marketing spending, while AI inspection ensures 100% compliance with operational standards. Data-driven operational optimization delivers real profit growth—adjusting staff scheduling alone lifted monthly profit by 15% for early adopter stores.

This article shares key insights for upstream production factories in the tea beverage and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sectors:

1. Business demand and opportunities: Downstream brands are increasingly demanding higher raw material quality consistency and supply chain resilience. Ningji’s establishment of a 1,000+ acre self-owned perfume lemon plantation, and its partnership with professional tea growing teams to optimize the full tea planting, processing and preservation process, demonstrates long-term, stable demand for high-quality raw materials with controlled sourcing and consistent quality. Fresh fruit preservation and end-to-end traceability technology are core competitiveness for upstream suppliers.

2. Digital transformation insights: Leading downstream brands have already completed end-to-end AI digital transformation, and can use big promotion sales forecasts to drive upstream picking and warehouse allocation planning. This requires upstream factories to accelerate their own digital transformation to connect with downstream intelligent supply chain systems, in order to qualify as suppliers for leading brands.

3. New value opportunities: Digital transformation helps upstream players reduce inventory损耗 and stockout risks. It enables stable operations even during sudden short-term traffic surges, improves supply service capabilities, and helps secure long-term cooperation with downstream brands.

This article outlines key insights for service providers serving the consumer industry:

1. Core pain points of industry clients: Most consumer brands currently only deploy AI for isolated single-point use cases, with siloed systems across different business departments that create data islands, failing to improve efficiency at the organizational level. Brands urgently need integrated AI solutions that cover the full business chain, rather than disconnected standalone tools.

2. Proven implementation path: End-to-end AI digital systems effectively solve this pain point. Ningji’s core ChatBI system works in synergy with AI customer service, AI store self-inspection and AI food delivery operation assistants to cover all scenarios including store operations, customer service, management and internal administration. It efficiently handles external business, replaces 60% of repetitive administrative work internally, and improves overall efficiency by over 30%. AI customer service also costs only 1/20th of the price of human agents per query, delivering significant cost reduction.

3. Development insights: AI implementation in the consumer industry should not be a conceptual gimmick. Technology teams must work on the ground at frontline stores to build systems that fit actual business scenarios, in order to develop products that gain market recognition.

This article outlines core takeaways for platform operators in the chain brand and retail investment platform sectors:

1. Core merchant demand for platforms: Chain brand merchants need intelligent services that connect data across the full business chain to eliminate data silos and improve profitability certainty for franchisees. Ningji’s transformation into an algorithm-driven operating platform demonstrates that full-stack intelligent services covering site selection, store setup, operations, after-sales and supply chain are the core demand of merchants.

2. Replicable operational practices: Platforms should turn core capabilities into standardized intelligent services—for example, building a data-driven scientific model for site selection to reduce decision-making risk for franchisees. When rolling out new systems, brands do not need to enforce adoption across the entire network: testing with seed stores to deliver proven profit results will naturally win adoption from other merchants. Platforms should also run regular branded IP campaigns to reactivate existing members and improve user retention.

3. Risk mitigation: The new tea beverage industry has entered a phase of market clearing, so platforms should not pursue blind expansion. They must first solidify their digital intelligence and supply chain infrastructure to handle short-term traffic fluctuations from large promotions, maintain low stockout and损耗 rates, and ensure stable overall platform operations.

This article provides a firsthand,典型 case study of digital transformation for consumer brands for new consumption industry researchers:

1. New industry trends: AI implementation in the consumer industry has evolved from the single-point tool phase to a new phase of end-to-end AI operating systems. As a leading new tea beverage brand, Ningji has completed the full-stack closed-loop AI digital transformation ahead of peers, and verified the effectiveness of its model during the large-scale Ningbao Festival promotion, making it a new benchmark for digital transformation in the consumer industry.

2. New business model exploration: Ningji has broken through the traditional positioning of chain tea beverage brands, repositioning itself as an algorithm-driven digital operating platform. It has turned site selection, operations and supply chain into calculable, predictable and replicable data science, solving the pain point that most viral consumer brands struggle to sustain long-term growth, and offers a new paradigm for delivering predictable growth.

3. Research implications: Amid accelerating industry clearing and fierce存量 competition in the new tea beverage sector, digital transformation is the core path to solving industry-wide efficiency pain points and unlocking cost reduction and growth. AI implementation must return to core business fundamentals and fit frontline operational scenarios, rather than serving as a conceptual marketing gimmick. This case provides important reference value for research on digital transformation in the consumer industry.