In 2025, Chinese dessert soups, an old category, suddenly became popular.
Among the segment’s representative companies are, arguably, the Mak Kee Milk Company and Chiu Gee. Over the past year, their store counts increased by roughly 1,000 and 300, respectively. Mak Kee’s expansion has been especially striking. At the start of 2025, it had only 53 stores. One year later, it had become the largest Chinese dessert soup chain, under the Makkee Dessert brand.
On the other side are older players that have seen little growth for a long time. As of today, Honeymoon Dessert, founded in 1995, has about 200 stores. Meet Fresh entered mainland China in 2009 and currently has more than 500 stores. Over the past several decades, they have seen little major change or innovation.
What happened to the Chinese dessert soup category? And what opportunities did companies such as Mak Kee seize?
In 2021, founder Xu Kang opened Mak Kee’s first store in Huzhou, Zhejiang. By using milk as the base, the brand sought to soften the flavor profile of traditional Chinese dessert soups, which tend to have stronger regional characteristics. At the end of 2024, the brand caught Xie Yongliang’s attention. At the time, Mak Kee’s founding team was still working out of a shared office in Nanxun, Huzhou, with only a small team.
