China 101
Mixue Bingcheng
蜜雪冰城
China's ultra-budget tea and ice cream chain, famous for one-dollar drinks, a catchy jingle, and one of the largest store counts of any food chain in the world.
Mixue Bingcheng, honey snow ice city, started in 1997 as a shaved-ice stall in Zhengzhou and became the king of cheap drinks. Its formula is ruthless affordability: ice cream cones and lemonades for the equivalent of well under a dollar, tea drinks rarely above one or two, made possible by deep vertical integration and franchising.
The chain operates tens of thousands of stores, putting it among the largest food service networks on Earth by location count, ahead of McDonald's or Starbucks by that measure. Its snowman mascot and earworm jingle, simply the brand name sung over and over, became a national meme in 2021 and did more marketing than any ad budget.
Mixue has expanded aggressively across Southeast Asia, where its red-signed shops are now common in Indonesia and Vietnam. Its 2025 Hong Kong IPO drew massive investor demand, making the budget brand a stock market darling.