China's leading instant retail platforms are stepping beyond their digital roots. On Dec 19, Ella Supermarket, or Xiaoxiang Supermarket, the instant retail brand under Meituan, officially opened its first offline store in Beijing.

The store is located in Wanliu Shopping Center in Haidian district, an area surrounded by high-end residential compounds and close to the Zhongguancun technology hub.

Covering about 4,500 square meters, the outlet adopts a large-store format that clearly differentiates it from Meituan's hard-discount community supermarket brand, Happy Monkey.

In September, Happy Monkey opened its first national store in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. The brand has since expanded to eight locations.

Ella Supermarket has developed more than 1,000 warehouses to support its instant retail services, covering nearly 30 cities in the country.

In Beijing, the new Ella store positions itself toward mid — to high-end consumers, with a strong emphasis on fresh food and prepared meals, to capture traffic, enhance user experience and build brand visibility.

In addition to staples such as vegetables, fruit and seafood, the store features a wide range of freshly prepared items, including salted-baked chicken and meat-and-egg burgers. The store also stocks higher-end items such as Boston lobster and king crab.

Private-label products are another key focus. During its opening promotion, the store introduced a "lucky bag" containing mostly Ella-branded items. Many of these products already rank highly on the platform's bestseller lists.

Consultancy Worldpanel data show that in the first three quarters of 2025, over 48 percent of Chinese urban households purchased private label products, an increase of 10 percentage points compared to the same period last year, reflecting the gradual increase in consumer acceptance of private labels.

Online platforms like Pupu and Ella Supermarket formed distinctive private label ranges in high-frequency consumption categories, relying on their warehouse model and efficient O2O delivery networks to further strengthen consumer loyalty to their platforms, said the Worldpanel report.

Ella's offline expansion is not alone. Instant retail platform Pupu Supermarket is preparing to open its first offline store in Fuzhou, Fujian province, with a reported area of about 5,000 square meters.

wangzhuoqiong@chinadaily.com.cn