Mooncake gift box sales fell 45.17% year on year — how should herbal tea gift boxes adjust their stock?
Mooncake gift box sales fell about 45.17% year on year, yet health-focused snacks surged. The lesson for herbal tea brands is to rethink what goes inside the box.
Mooncake gift box sales fell about 45.17% year on year in the run-up to Mid-Autumn Festival, with unit sales down about 49.04%. But health-focused snacks grew sharply on instant retail channels over the same period. The gift box business has not disappeared — the way it is done has changed.
First, what actually changed this year
The short version: what fell was the expensive, empty box, not the act of giving.
According to media visits and monitoring during the double festival period, mooncake gift box unit sales fell about 49.04% year on year and sales value fell about 45.17%, with boxes in the thousand-yuan tier dropping by more than 70%. At the same time, a light box priced at 29.9 yuan sold more than two million units. Over the same window, JD's Qixian supermarket saw its own-brand snack sales grow more than threefold during the double festival period.
Put the two sets of numbers together and the picture is clear: the budget did not disappear, it moved from "looking respectable" to "being worth it". Packaging can no longer carry the price; the contents have to.
What PAKONTONG did at the time
Turning to our own case. PAKONTONG's Twenty-Four Herbs herbal tea gift box series has six expressions: Baian Selected, Ejiao and Rose Nourishing, Chrysanthemum and Juemingzi, Red Bean and Coix Light, Suanzaoren and Fuling Sleep, and Ginseng and Huangjing. They come in individual small tins with a premium gift box, suited to giving to friends and family, and are sold on JD.
Two moves in this approach are worth noting.
First, the gift box was made into "a small tin you can drink from every day", not a once-a-year display. Individual small tins mean the product does not look out of place on a shelf or a desk; the gift box is simply one particular packaging form. Once the box is gone, the tins remain.
Second, the gift box was not detached from the store. The PAKONTONG Herbal Tea & Coffee store at City Balcony, Zhuhai, serves freshly brewed herbal tea by day, new Chinese-style coffee (with chenpi, osmanthus and longjing folded into the coffee) and Chinese whole-leaf tea, and by night herbal craft brews and herbal cocktails. A customer tastes and sees the small tins in the store first, which makes ordering before the festival a natural next step.
The e-commerce store and the private-domain mini-program (scan-to-order, membership and orders) are where a single store visit becomes several touchpoints across the year — the sales window for a gift box in fact starts counting from the day a customer first walks in.
Other people's numbers say the same thing
According to a store-visit report by Sina News dated 1 October 2026, a single cup of osmanthus brew at "Yeye Bu Pao Cha" costs about 15–20 yuan, hand-fermented with osmanthus and glutinous rice, with a very high repurchase rate; one customer came in during heavy rain and half the drink spilled, and staff replaced it free of charge — the post received more than a thousand likes on Weibo. One judgement in that report is accurate: product strength decides whether you survive, service strength decides whether you become popular.
Two more sets of figures are worth borrowing. According to an industry report, searches for wellness tea drinks grew more than 80% year on year in 2025; another industry observation notes that drink shops focused on fresh fruit and natural flowers and herbs saw average daily footfall rise about 30% year on year.
Taken together, the average ticket in this business is not high. Community street-side shops mostly sit at 10–18 yuan, mall grab-and-go shops at 15–25 yuan, and high-end herbal custom shops at 28–48 yuan. What holds a shop up is high-frequency visits plus word of mouth, not per-cup profit. Gift boxes are a supplement, not the main line.
What readers can borrow
- Move the gift box structure towards "light" and "layered". Put the large boxes back and bring the two-tin, four-tin and individual small-tin formats forward. What cooled this year was precisely the thousand-yuan tier.
- Stretch the sales window from the 30 days before the festival to the whole year. Use freshly made cups and in-store experience to cultivate regulars in ordinary times, then rely on membership and the order system for one concentrated activation before the festival, rather than waiting until the goods are stacked in the warehouse to start thinking about who to sell to.
- Work out the ticket structure clearly. Daily cups carry cash flow; gift boxes carry profit and brand tone. Once the ratio between the two is out of balance, what follows the festival is inventory.
- Do not cut the service budget. The advice that report gave peers: raise the staff training budget to at least 10% of total investment, and design at least three service trigger points.
What this means for operators
When gift boxes do not sell, it is usually not that the festival has gone, but that what is inside the box does not match the price.
In running a herbal tea shop, the daily cup is the entrance, the gift box is the exit, and the line between them is membership and private domain. The PAKONTONG Herbal Tea & Coffee store at City Balcony, Zhuhai, brews herbal tea by day and serves herbal craft brews by night, then uses its e-commerce store and private-domain mini-program to catch repeat purchases — doing exactly this one thing: turning a single purchase into a relationship that can be reached again and again.
After a festival cycle, only those who keep a list of names have truly made the business work.
Experience store, e-commerce store and mini program support.