Crafting culture, not just products: how Honeymoon Dessert and Ah-Ma Handmade redefine brand value in China’s sweet treat market

In China’s crowded dessert and beverage market, where speed, scale, and sameness often dominate, two brands - Honeymoon Dessert (满记甜品) and Ah-Ma Handmade (阿嬷手作) - are carving out a different path. Instead of chasing scale through aggressive franchising or racing to the bottom with price wars, they are playing the long game: building brands rooted in culture, craftsmanship, and emotional connection.

While both brands have achieved impressive growth by deepening their identity and expanding their reach, their approaches differ in meaningful ways. Honeymoon Dessert has leaned into category innovation and national scalability, while Ah-Ma Handmade has crafted a highly localised and emotionally resonant experience city by city. Together, they offer powerful lessons for brands looking to build lasting consumer relationships in a rapidly evolving market.

From Craft to Scale: Honeymoon Dessert’s New Retail Breakthrough

Founded in 1995, Honeymoon Dessert is a pioneer of Chinese-style desserts. But rather than resting on its legacy, the brand has actively reinvented itself. Its latest success - a shelf-stable Double-Skin Milk with Red Beans, developed in partnership with Nestlé and sold through Sam’s Club - hit over 10 million units sold in a single month. This product is emblematic of the brand’s broader strategy: use innovation and quality to expand traditional dessert formats into modern, scalable retail channels.

Key to this is Honeymoon Dessert’s ability to translate dine-in quality into packaged products. The upgraded dessert mimics the flavour and texture of its in-store version but can be stored for six months at room temperature without preservatives. This opens up new consumption scenarios, offering traditional comfort with modern convenience.

Behind the scenes, Honeymoon Dessert has built a formidable supply chain and R&D infrastructure, with three central factories and over 1,200 dessert SKUs. By focusing on “superstar SKUs” that can travel across channels - from e-commerce to convenience stores - the brand is crafting a multi-channel growth engine rooted in quality, consistency, and trust.

Yet for all its emphasis on innovation and scale, Honeymoon Dessert has not abandoned emotional storytelling. Its messaging continues to emphasise “the taste of home”, a theme echoed in both product development and marketing.

Slower, Deeper, Closer: Ah-Ma Handmade’s City-by-City Brand Building

By contrast, Ah-Ma Handmade is moving more slowly, but perhaps more deeply. While many tea and dessert brands rush to franchise and expand, Ah-Ma has taken a deliberately selective and city-specific approach. With only around 60 stores nationwide, the brand prioritises emotional stickiness over mass visibility, and curates its experience around the theme of “home.”

But this wasn’t always the case. In its early years, Ah-Ma focused on product quality and handmade techniques, emphasizing fresh ingredients like black sugar from Guangxi, hand-rolled taro balls, and buffalo milk. Its aesthetic and style drew from Taiwanese nostalgia, anchored by the figure of “Ah-Ma” (grandmother) - a warm, maternal symbol that infused the brand with emotional depth.

The shift from product-led storytelling to brand-led emotional narrative began around 2020, as Ah-Ma expanded beyond its Guangxi roots into cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai. Initially it leaned on regional identity, promoting Guangxi ingredients and calling itself “Guangxi’s pride.” But over time, it became clear that relying too heavily on a single origin story created vulnerability: when it had to replace its buffalo milk supply in 2023, consumer backlash was swift.

This sparked a smart evolution: rather than being about one place, Ah-Ma reoriented itself around “the taste of home.” It was a universal idea that could flex across regions while maintaining emotional depth.

Crucially, Ah-Ma brought this to life through hyper-local store design and storytelling. Each store is adapted to its host city’s cultural context. In Wuxi, it referenced local folk art (Huishan clay figurines); in Foshan, it was housed in traditional arcade architecture; in Shanghai, the store sits in a historic girls' school attended by author Eileen Chang. Even within malls, stores incorporate open kitchens and family-style elements, making the experience feel intimate and lived-in.

This localisation by city is more than aesthetics, it’s a strategic brand act. Ah-Ma uses local ingredients, dialects, history, and sensory details to connect with each market in a way that feels personal, not packaged. Combined with initiatives like kids' workshops and heritage storytelling, the brand constructs a multi-sensory, intergenerational narrative around food, memory, and belonging.

Two Paths, Shared Wisdom

While Honeymoon Dessert and Ah-Ma Handmade operate at different speeds and scales, they share some important principles:

1. Rooting Innovation in Emotion:
Both brands innovate, but not just for novelty’s sake. Their products reflect deeper values: tradition, family, and quality. This makes their offerings feel grounded and meaningful, not just trendy.

2. Controlling the Brand Experience:
Neither brand has pursued aggressive franchising. Instead, they retain control over product, space, and storytelling, ensuring brand coherence and depth across touch points.

3. Expanding the Definition of “Local”:
Honeymoon uses local ingredients to scale national products; Ah-Ma uses local cultural narratives to scale emotional resonance. In different ways, both show how localisation is not a limitation, it’s leverage.

4. “Home” as a Universal Hook:
Both use the concept of home - whether in the form of nostalgic flavours or family memories - to build lasting emotional bonds. In a world of fast food and fleeting trends, “home” is an anchor that doesn’t go out of style.

What it all Means

For brands looking to grow in China - or any complex, culturally rich market - Honeymoon Dessert and Ah-Ma Handmade offer a playbook that values depth over speed, substance over sizzle.

Honeymoon shows how to scale without dilution, using infrastructure, partnerships, and product-led thinking to extend reach. Ah-Ma demonstrates how to embed a brand in the emotional and cultural life of a city, not just its retail grid.

As competition intensifies and consumers seek more than just functional value, the lesson is clear: the future belongs to brands that don’t just deliver good products, but create a sense of place, memory, and meaning.