One late-night social-media post captured the mood: a Guangzhou shopper, wide awake and furious, swore she’d never seen pine nuts sold at 218 yuan per jin (500g). The gripe went viral. On Xiaohongshu and other platforms Xueji Chaohuo — often nicknamed “Xueji Jewellery” or the “Hermès of nuts” — has become shorthand for outrage, admiration and idle price-guessing, with the hashtag drawing tens of millions of reads even as long queues form outside its mall outlets.
The spectacle is real and contradictory. Xueji’s stores, which sell pistachios and freshly roasted cashews near 100 yuan per jin and common seeds at 23.8 yuan per jin, are busy. Shoppers wrapped in down jackets wait in winter winds just to look, to photograph the glowing display cases and to tell the story of having paid, or nearly paid, what they consider an absurd sum for a handful of snacks.
The price shock is partly behavioural. Xueji sells most items loose by weight; customers often don’t appreciate the total cost until after a sealed bag is weighed at the till. That moment — the “back-stab” feeling when the final figure is announced — has fuelled a culture of self-mockery: people now buy cashews and candied fruit “by the piece” to limit their spending.
A commercial reading of Xueji’s price point shows structural logic beneath the apparent excess. The brand has chosen mall locations and big-format stores: a “standard” outlet is about 80 square metres, and franchise start-up costs published on its website total about 463,000 yuan, including a roughly 83,000 yuan brand fee, 200,000 yuan in equipment and 180,000 yuan in fit-out. Those rents and capex, plus heavy marketing and influencer seeding, convert into a premium offer.
That premium is also emotional. Xueji’s core customers skew 30–40-year-old parents who are buying for children and elders; their spending is driven less by unit price than by trust, presentation and the story they can tell. The chain has exploited that gifting and status impulse in the same way other Chinese brands have monetised the social value of conspicuous consumption.
Yet the financial foundations are vulnerable. Raw-material spikes that bolstered shell prices in 2024 have largely eased: by 2025 sunflower seed buying prices in some producing regions fell about 24 percent. Industry data show China consumes roughly eight million tonnes of nuts annually — a huge market — but the category is intimate and familiar; most consumers can judge value themselves with a handful of seeds.
Xueji’s manifesto of “same-day roasting” is central to its differentiation, but investigations and store disclosures suggest not all products are literally roasted and sold on the same day. Once freshness claims lose credibility, the brand’s premium becomes harder to defend against rivals such as Bestore, Three Squirrels and Lishanghuang, which compete on price, packaging and giftability.
Signs of strain are visible. Xueji’s founder admitted sales softness in early 2024, and internal metrics published by staff suggest average daily orders and basket sizes are modest. When consumers reintroduce comparative price logic into their purchases — weighing a bag of seeds against a pork chop or a prepared meal — the emotional markup is the first thing to go. Whether queues outside Xueji remain a lasting signal of consumer upgrade or a traffic-driven moment amplified by social media will be clearer after the next major buying season.