Searches for delivered New Year’s Eve dinners in China surged this February, signaling a fast-growing shift in how families mark the Spring Festival. Online interest in “年夜饭送到家” jumped more than 600% year-on-year in the first week of February, while queries for takeout banquet options and rankings climbed by several hundred percent, according to platform data. The spike reflects a market that has matured beyond ad-hoc delivery into a predictable, high-demand seasonal category.
Restaurants that once relied solely on in-house banquets are racing to adapt. A fully booked Hangzhou restaurant began offering a first-time delivery service in January, promising free delivery within five kilometres to meet unmet demand. “When people couldn’t book, I thought about how to let them still have a reunion meal, so I came up with delivery,” said the restaurant manager, describing the pragmatic calculus behind the new service.
In Henan’s Luohe, catering businesses assembled multiple free-dispatch teams to deliver preordered New Year’s Eve meals as far as 30 kilometres out to rural villages. Such logistical extensions show how restaurateurs are stretching their operations to capture festival spending that would previously have taken place around shared tables inside dining rooms.
Platform search data underlines the scale of the shift: interest in “external-takeaway New Year’s Eve dinners” rose over 900%, “New Year’s Eve dinner rankings” increased by 420%, and searches for “New Year’s Eve set meals” grew 357% compared with the first week of January. Those numbers point to both rising consumer appetite and intensified competition among restaurants and delivery platforms during the country’s busiest holiday.
This trend matters because the Spring Festival remains China’s single largest seasonal consumption event, and a change in how families source their reunion meals carries wider implications for the foodservice ecosystem. For restaurants it opens a new revenue stream that can smooth seasonality and monetize kitchen capacity without expanding dining seating. For delivery platforms and local logistics providers it presents a concentrated surge in demand that requires temporary scaling of manpower, routing and packaging.
The shift also reflects broader social and economic forces: a more time-pressed urban population, smaller households, continued internal migration that leaves some relatives apart at holiday time, and the normalization of digital ordering since the pandemic years. Consumers are increasingly willing to outsource culinary labor for the symbolic ritual of the reunion dinner, trading presence in a restaurant for convenience, variety and the safety of eating at home.
But there are trade-offs. Delivering complex banquet meals imposes operational strains—food-safety risks, costs for insulated packaging and cold-chain handling, and pressure on delivery workers tasked with long trips and tight time windows. There are environmental consequences from increased single-use packaging and commercial pressure to offer ever-faster delivery at low or no cost.
For now, rapid search growth and local initiatives—free delivery within urban radii, dispatch teams to distant villages—signal a market reconfiguration rather than a transient fad. Expect restaurants and platforms to refine packaged festival menus, invest in logistics and hygiene certifications, and explore premium, subscription or shared-revenue arrangements that lock in customers ahead of peak holidays.