Mooncakes are a must-have food for Chinese families during the Mid-Autumn Festival, but every year after the festival, businesses are left with a lot of unsold mooncakes. What is the fate of these unsold mooncakes?
October 6th was the Mid-Autumn Festival this year. Usually, after the Mid-Autumn Festival, a large number of mooncakes as festival food are left unsold. According to a report by “Deep Blue Finance” under Deep Blue New Media Technology (Chengdu) Co., Ltd. on October 6th, in order to increase sales, some businesses in Beijing have started promotional activities such as “buy one get one free” and “buy ten get one free” on the morning of September 28th at some shopping malls.
Even with strong promotions before the festival, there are still a significant number of mooncakes that cannot be sold, and businesses have their own ways of dealing with these unsold mooncakes after they are taken off the shelves.
Some supermarket staff revealed that after the Mid-Autumn Festival, unsold mooncakes will be taken off the shelves and sent back to the manufacturers, and the sales on the Mid-Autumn Festival day may only last for half a day. According to the usual practice in previous years, most mooncakes on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival are likely to have a “buy one get one free” promotion.
A mooncake manufacturer in Henan told China Economic Net that unsold mooncakes will be sold at a low price to nearby supermarkets on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival. They offer discounts, sometimes up to 70% off or even lower. Some businesses also distribute unsold mooncakes to employees as welfare.
Some businesses even engage in the business of selling near-expiry mooncakes (foods that are about to reach their expiration date but are still within their shelf life). They purchase soon-to-expire mooncakes from manufacturers at a low price and then sell them, as there is still a market for them due to their cheap price. An intermediary in Hebei introduced that the purchase price of near-expiry mooncakes is about 1500 RMB per ton.
In addition, some remaining mooncakes are sold to relevant companies at the price of 500 RMB per ton to be used as animal feed. Some feed factories will process the mooncakes and add them as ingredients into animal feed.
As for expired mooncakes, there are measures in place. According to a report by CCTV, expired mooncakes will be collected uniformly by relevant departments, colored and destroyed in accordance with relevant regulations to ensure that expired mooncakes are not resold in the market, and to ensure that manufacturing companies do not reuse the collected mooncakes as raw materials for further processing.
However, some netizens have revealed that unsold mooncakes are reused by manufacturers by crushing them and using them as fillings. Netizen “A0007 Mr. Song” said: “This year’s filling is last year’s mooncake filling, next year’s filling will be this year’s mooncake filling.”