This Spring Festival, the centerpiece ritual of the Chinese New Year — the family reunion dinner — is being reordered by apps and logistics. Searches for phrases such as “year‑end dinner delivered to home” surged more than 600% in the first week of February compared with the first week of January, reflecting a sudden spike in demand for prepared festive meals delivered rather than cooked at home.
Restaurants across the country have moved quickly to respond. A fully booked Hangzhou restaurant began offering, for the first time, an a la carte delivery service with free drop‑off within five kilometres after in‑house seats sold out in January, while catering teams in Luohe, Henan mobilised extra free delivery crews to carry preordered dinners up to 30 kilometres into surrounding villages.
Platform search data show the shift is broad: searches for takeaway reunion meals rose over 900% year‑on‑year, while queries for ranked New Year menus and set‑meal packages climbed 420% and 357% respectively. Those figures suggest consumers are not only seeking convenience but also comparing menus, prices and rankings online, turning an intimate family ritual into a seasonal market for branded food products.
The trend matters because the reunion dinner is an unusually stubborn cultural practice; changes in how it is consumed signal deeper shifts in urban lifestyles, logistics capability and platform power. China’s mature food‑delivery ecosystem is now able to scale up for peak seasonal demand, pushing into suburban and rural areas and expanding the commercial footprint of holiday consumption.
The consequences are multiple. For restaurateurs, packaging reunion menus as delivered or takeaway products creates a new revenue stream and helps capture customers who otherwise would be disappointed by sold‑out dining rooms. For platforms and delivery couriers, holiday spikes highlight opportunities to monetise logistics capacity, though they also raise questions about labour strain, food safety and packaging waste as seasonal volumes intensify.
Longer term, this pattern could normalise convenience within deeply traditional practices: expect more prebuilt festive menus, ranked ‘best of’ lists to influence purchases, and investments in cold‑chain and dark kitchens to service holiday demand. Policymakers and industry observers will watch whether this is a short‑term convenience response or a durable rerouting of ritual through marketplaces and apps.