On March 12, 2025, MR. Noodle Chen China Lanzhou, a leading brand in the noodle industry, stood out from nearly a thousand participating enterprises and was honored with the title of "Top Ten Noodle Shop Brands in 2025" by Hongcan.com. This selection was initiated by Hongcan.com, a leading domestic catering industry media. It is comprehensively evaluated based on multiple core indicators such as the scale of stores, profitability, and innovation index, and is regarded as the "value vane" of catering brands in the industry.

This summit brought together hundreds of decision-makers from both upstream and downstream of the catering industry chain, and many industry leaders were invited to attend the conference. Just as industry experts emphasized at the conference: "The competition in the catering industry in 2025 has entered the stage of a'system war', and brands need to make efforts simultaneously in three aspects: scale, innovation, and digitization." And this assertion is in deep alignment with the growth path of MR. Noodle Chen.

 

The National Expansion Journey of a Bowl of Beef Noodles

Since opening its first store in Shanghai in 2020,MR. Noodle Chen China Lanzhou has been growing rapidly at an average annual growth rate of 60%. As of March 2025, it has nearly 300 stores across the country, covering dozens of cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou. Some stores have even been opened overseas. On average, it sells over ten million servings of noodles annually. Its explosive growth stems from an accurate prediction of the industry trends:

Category Dividends: The market size of Chinese - style noodle shops has exceeded 137 billion yuan, and consumption upgrading has driven the rapid growth of the industry's popularity.

Model Innovation: The average efficiency of traditional noodle shops is less than 2,000 yuan per square meter. It is necessary to improve efficiency through standardization and digitization.

Talent Iteration: The proportion of undergraduate practitioners in the catering industry has increased from 12% in 2019 to 35% in 2025.  

To this end, MR. Noodle Chen has established a management team with members from the "KFC and McDonald's" system. The core members come from chain giants such as McDonald's China and KFC, and most of the management team members have overseas catering management experience, forming a double-helix gene of "traditional craftsmanship + modern management".

 

Systematic Empowerment: A Full-link Revolution from Site Selection to Operation

At the roundtable forum of the summit, a staff member of MR. Noodle Chen revealed, "Our core competitiveness is not just the pulled noodles, but the systematic ability to enable entrepreneurs to successfully run a noodle shop." This set of capabilities is manifested in three empowerment systems:

Refined Training

With professional supervisor training, a 30-day training at the headquarters is provided for the core positions in the store, namely the noodle pullers and store managers. For the remaining positions, a 15-day training is arranged. Moreover, when a new store opens, two supervisor instructors will be assigned to guide the store operation for 14 days, so as to ensure the smooth operation of the store.

Outsourced Takeout Operation Management

Noodle Chen China Lanzhouhas invested heavily to establish a takeout operation team. The headquarters takes full responsibility for the operation of platforms such as Ele.me and Meituan on behalf of the stores. It provides favorable takeout operation plans for the stores to increase their turnover on the takeout platforms.

Risk Resistance Mechanism

The direct management policy is put forward. The headquarters of MR. Noodle Chen dispatches a management team to standardize the issue of staff turnover in stores and assist with store operations.

 

Breaking through with Digital Intelligence: The Technological Evolution of a Bowl of Noodles

In the Shanghai headquarters of MR. Noodle Chen, there is a dedicated backstage that records the operation data of stores across the country:

It covers aspects such as how much the smart QR code ordering system has reduced the ordering time of each store, how much the ingredient loss rate has been lowered, or how much the repurchase rate of the more than 10 million users accumulated in the membership system has increased.

Deeper changes are taking place at the supply chain end: The supply chain inherits the management experience of well-known chain brands and strictly standardizes the procurement and acceptance processes. By leveraging big data and artificial intelligence technologies, it automatically generates orders and approval processes, thus improving procurement efficiency. Systems such as the whole-process cold chain logistics, warehousing management, and vehicle tracking are implemented to handle order data and monitor warehousing within the supply chain.

The "New Traditionalism" in the Era of Digital Intelligence

The success of MR. Noodle Chen provides threefold enlightenment for Chinese cuisine: The modernization of traditional categories requires "dual genes": while retaining the rich flavor of hand-pulled noodles, it also injects the scientific nature of chain management. The essence of scale expansion is the output of capabilities: By providing systematic empowerment, the threshold for franchising is lowered, and controllable growth is achieved. Digitalization is not about replacing humanity but magnifying the spirit of craftsmanship: Technical means are used to safeguard the authenticity of the Lanzhou beef noodles, which are characterized by "one clear soup, two white radishes, three red chilies, and four green coriander leaves". From a bowl of hot noodle soup by the Huangpu River to an industry case on the Red Restaurant Network list, MR. Noodle Chen China Lanzhou has demonstrated the modern breakthrough of traditional cuisine in five years. When more and more time-honored brands are trapped in the binary opposition of "tradition and innovation", this emerging brand has already proven with nearly 300 stores across the country that true inheritance is never a simple replication of the past, but a reinterpretation of the vitality of tradition in contemporary language.