I have watched a lot of Western food formats land in China over the years, and I have learned to be sceptical of the word “boom.” Most of the time the story is smaller than the headline. The burger is the exception. What is happening in China’s burger market right now is one of the clearest signals I can point a food brand to, and most of the international brands I talk to are reading it wrong. They see a Western fast-food success story. What is actually happening is that the burger is stopping being Western at all.
Look at who is piling in. Haidilao, the hotpot giant, opened its first Huanxianbao outlet in Wuhan serving Angus beef burgers next to pasta and pizza, and its Huang Ji Huang brand now sells “wok-fired burgers” with braised and garlic chicken. Coffee chain M Stand, ice cream brand DQ, and rice noodle chain Axiang have all run burger experiments. Pizza Hut has gone furthest: its China-only Bisheng Burger concept jumped from two locations to more than 200 in six months, mostly inside existing restaurants using spare kitchen capacity, generating double-digit incremental sales and targeting 500 to 600 outlets by year end. Even Wendy’s is preparing to return, with an agreement to open as many as 1,000 restaurants over the next decade.
From foreign food to everyday format
The numbers explain the rush. China’s Western fast-food market grew 11% in 2024 to ¥297.5 billion, and burgers accounted for an estimated 70.6% of sales (Xinhua, Western Fast Food Category Report 2025). But if you stop at “Western fast food is booming,” you miss the more important change. The hamburger is becoming less culturally Western and more of a universal meal format.
Tastien is the proof. Its hand-rolled, freshly baked buns and fillings like Beijing duck, preserved vegetable pork, and spicy chicken took it to 6,000 stores in 2023, more than McDonald’s China, and past 11,000 by 2025. It did that by adapting the burger to Chinese tastes, cooking cues, and ideas of freshness. This is exactly what happened with coffee. Coffee took off in China when it stopped being a bitter Western drink and became a flexible base for coconut, fruit, tea, and regional flavours. Burgers are on the same path. Almost anything can sit between two buns, including ingredients and dishes that carry strong local associations.
A wider food and ingredient opportunity
This is where it stops being a restaurant story and becomes relevant to every F&B brand I work with. Burgers need beef, chicken, cheese, butter, buns, sauces, and packaging. The constant pressure to launch novel products widens the door further. Across 45 Western fast-food brands monitored between January 2024 and February 2025, more than 1,000 new products launched, and “cheese” appeared in the name of 13.9% of them. If you supply an ingredient, a format, or a flavour, this category is generating demand at a pace few others match. For brands weighing China entry, our China F&B guide is where I would start.
Burgers have become media too
The part that surprises brands most is that burger chains have become some of China’s most active IP collaborators. In the first half of 2026 there were 89 IP collaborations across 12 major restaurant chains, up 27% year on year. KFC alone ran 23, with McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Wallace, and Haidilao all highly active. These chains are marketing machines with thousands of physical touchpoints. If your brand can tap into a collaboration, it reaches consumers in places you could never have bought your way into. It is the offline mirror of what a good Douyin or Tmall campaign does online, and the smart brands run both together. For the platform side of that, see our Tmall management guide.
My advice to any food or ingredient brand is simple. Stop thinking of the burger as a Western product and start thinking of it as a format that Chinese consumers now own and localise at will. That reframing changes what you make, how you position it, and who you partner with. The brands that adapt to Chinese taste, like Tastien did and like coffee did before it, are the ones that scale. The ones that ship a Western recipe unchanged and wait for demand tend to wait a long time. For the wider shifts shaping this market, this breakdown of China’s evolving food and beverage trends is worth your time.
Harry Huang, Founder of EAC Ecommerce China Agency. Harry founded EAC to help foreign brands sell in China without the guesswork. EAC is an independent agency running Tmall, JD.com, and Douyin stores for foreign F&B and consumer brands, with one metric in mind: revenue per RMB spent.
Selling food or beverage in China? Get a free audit from our team. Connect with Harry Huang: ecommercechinaagency.com/author/philip/
