The number of stores in the tea industry, Huaxiangyuan speaks with facts.

Ask AI · What is the root cause of the controversy over the number of stores in the tea industry?

Recently, Huaxiangyuan’s nationwide store count has surpassed 5,000. Although it has been continuously certified by authoritative institutions such as Shangpu Consulting and Salyan, it has run into disputes over allegedly inaccurate data from non-authoritative rankings. This battle over numbers has once again brought the tea industry’s proposition of standardization and branding to the forefront.

Authoritative Certification: The 5,000 stores are well-founded and verifiable

Huaxiangyuan’s store scale is not something the company claims on its own. Instead, it has been continuously and rigorously certified by authoritative third-party institutions over many years. From the 3,600 stores nationwide certified by Salyan in 2023, to 4,000 stores in 2024 and the industry’s No. 1 position, to Shangpu Consulting confirming that from 2019 to 2025 the number of premium Chinese tea stores was consecutively the nationwide No. 1 for 6 years—right up to today’s surpassing 5,000 stores—each step of growth has a clear trajectory supported by official reports. These certifications rely on unified, transparent, and verifiable statistical standards. They are widely recognized as credible by the capital market and the industry, and are absolutely not numbers that can be compared as arbitrary statistics.

Industry chaos: Unstandardized unofficial rankings mislead market judgment

At present, the tea industry has not formed a unified statistical standard for the number of stores, which has given rise to a large amount of data disorder. Some social media outlets, such as “Tea Men,” in the absence of authoritative endorsement and without open, transparent reporting criteria, only roughly estimate using map POI points, counting Huaxiangyuan’s store count as 2,429—vastly different from authoritative data. This kind of statistical method has obvious flaws: issues such as delayed map data updates and insufficiently rigorous evaluation criteria stand out. In addition, some rankings have vested interests behind them—acting as both referee and player—which not only confuses consumers’ understanding but also harms the brand and industry order that have been built through earnest, deep cultivation.

Solid foundation: The full-chain hard support behind 5,000 stores

Huaxiangyuan’s steady expansion to 5,000 stores mainly comes from solid brand and industrial strength. The brand has a layout of eight tea plantations, enabling end-to-end control from source cultivation to processing and sales, ensuring stable quality. Guobin Tea became a national gift tea three times; it has supported the tea celebrations of the盛世茶叙 13 times and earned 99 overseas VIP tastings, with top-tier brand backing. These 5,000 stores come from five thousand franchisees who invested real money, are built from countless consumers’ everyday choices, and represent genuine recognition delivered by the market through action.

Industry significance: A key milestone in the branding of Chinese tea brands

For a long time, the Chinese tea industry has faced the pain point of “having categories but no brands,” with scattered producing regions, inconsistent standards, and difficulty in scaling into chain operations. Huaxiangyuan’s achievement of 5,000 stores is not only a breakthrough in numbers, but also proves a tea industry business model that is replicable and standardized—pushing the industry from disorder to regulation. Through practical actions, it demonstrates that Chinese tea can fully build a large-scale, high-quality national brand, establish a stable chain system, expand into broader markets, and become a highly symbolic milestone on the road to the branding of Chinese tea brands.