Li Junyun, co-founder of Yiwei Fat Beef Small Hotpot: Many brands struggle to sustain themselves; they only address the issue of "newness."

Ask AI · Why does consumer trust become the ultimate moat in dining competition?

On March 25, the 2026 China Catering Industry Festival and the 35th HCC Global Catering Industry Expo, jointly hosted by the World Chinese Cuisine Industry Federation and Red餐网, were held at the Hangzhou Convention and Exhibition Center. In particular, during the roundtable dialogue session of the “2026 China Catering Category Development Forum,” Li Junyun, co-founder of Yiwéi Beef Hot Pot & Small Hot Pot, shared her views on category innovation.

△ Li Junyun, co-founder of Yiwéi Beef Hot Pot & Small Hot Pot

In Li Junyun’s view, today’s consumers are getting smarter and better at identifying what they truly want. “Innovation doesn’t have to mean doing something that doesn’t exist on Earth—that’s invention and creation. Real innovation is making customers feel new value.”

Li Junyun points out that the biggest hurdle for innovation must come from within. This is mainly reflected in two aspects:

First, the ability to sustain innovation. “Creating a hit is not hard—marketing spend, a spark of inspiration, and even sheer luck can make it happen. What’s hard is sustained innovation.”

Li Junyun believes that innovation in catering is mainly reflected in the monthly launch of new products—from user insights to product development, R&D, centralized procurement for the supply chain, rollout, training, member engagement, and online-to-offline channel marketing. “This entire process needs to be refined into systematic capabilities.”

“Relying on just one person or one department, you can’t continuously create hits for the long term. This requires multiple company departments to fight in coordination—this is a test of systematic capability.”

Second, balancing scale and refinement. Li Junyun says that Yiwéi Beef Hot Pot & Small Hot Pot has already laid out more than 100 stores nationwide, covering core areas such as Hunan, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. As a cross-regional brand, how to maintain refinement while achieving scaling is another challenge.

Li Junyun says that Yiwéi Beef Hot Pot & Small Hot Pot can quickly run through a model and open stores rapidly because the background company has been doing hot pot for more than ten years, accumulating experience and insights in supply chains and organizational capability building.

However, she admits that if a brand wants to become an absolute top leader, it still needs deeper user operations and occupying brand mindshare: “If consumers trust you, then you can become a top player.”

She also emphasizes: “In today’s environment of information equality, information overload, and highly scattered consumer attention, many hits only achieve ‘a sense of freshness,’ but they have not delivered ‘real value’ to consumers.”

Li Junyun believes that customers will only pay for products they see as sincere and for value that feels tangible—and that is, in fact, trust.

Li Junyun agrees with a viewpoint shared by Yu Yihong at the forum: “The only future dividend is trust.” She says, “ concepts like value-for-money and quality-for-price may become widespread for a long time in the future. What we will keep as our final moat will be user trust.”