Freshippo Brand Guidelines: Alibaba’s Hema Grocery Chain, Shanghai 2016 & a Store as Warehouse

A grocery idea that moved from JD.com to Alibaba.

Freshippo is the English name of Hema (盒马), the grocery chain owned by Alibaba Group. Writing for ChinaTalk in August 2023, the retail analyst Ed Sander noted that Alibaba spells the English name with a single “h,” and that the original store format is called Hema Xiansheng, also given as Hema Fresh. Chinese Wikipedia says the company was set up in March 2015 by Hou Yi, and that its first store opened in January 2016 in the Jinqiao economic and technological development zone in Shanghai.

The idea did not begin at Alibaba. ChinaTalk traces it to JD.com, where Hou had proposed an offline sales channel, with supermarkets, department stores and other shops, to JD’s founder. When the plan found no backing, Hou moved to Alibaba, started the Hema project and became its chief executive. Yicai Global reported in March 2024 that Hou had been director of logistics planning and general director of online-to-offline business at JD.com, that he set up Freshippo in 2015, and that he secured investment from Alibaba the following year.

English Wikipedia places the chain inside Alibaba’s “new retail” strategy, under which customers can shop in a store or order online for delivery in under 30 minutes. ChinaTalk gives the background: rising costs of winning online customers had pushed internet companies toward fresh food, a frequent purchase that could lead shoppers into other categories. The first Hema Xiansheng store, it says, was much publicised between 2016 and 2018.

Chinese Wikipedia says the company moved its headquarters from Hangzhou to Shanghai in 2020, and Yicai Global describes it as Shanghai-based. In March 2024 Hou stepped down as chief executive and was succeeded by Yan Xiaolei, until then the chain’s chief financial officer, Yicai Global reported; Hou stayed on as chief honorary adviser. The same report said Alibaba had announced in May 2023 that it intended to list Freshippo in Hong Kong within six to twelve months, and that the plan was later put on hold.

A supermarket that is also a fulfilment centre.

The Hema Xiansheng format is built around an app. ChinaTalk lists the pieces: shoppers can buy groceries in the store, order items on the spot for delivery home later, choose fresh food, mainly seafood, and have it prepared to eat in the store, or order online for delivery within 30 minutes inside a radius of about three kilometres. Checkout in these stores runs through the Hema app, it adds, and scanning a barcode brings up information about where the goods come from. Chinese Wikipedia adds that shelf labels use electronic paper and that stores have self-checkout machines.

The most visible feature sits overhead. ChinaTalk describes a conveyor system below the ceiling: pickers with handheld devices put bags holding parts of an order onto the rail, which carries them to a back room where the order is put together and handed to couriers. In this way, it says, Alibaba made a store that is also a fulfilment warehouse for online orders. Some products are packed with a large number showing the day of the week, to signal freshness. The same article reports a Chinese term, He Qu Fang, used for homes inside a Hema delivery area.

The name has grown into a family of formats and own labels. Chinese Wikipedia says that from 2017 the company launched own-label lines including Hema Daily Fresh and Hema Workshop, and later Hema MAX for its membership stores. TechNode reported in January 2023 on the formats then in use: Hema Xiansheng, the Hema X membership store, the discount format Hema Outlets, and Hema Neighborhood, a local pick-up business that was to move toward franchising. Chinese Wikipedia also records a Premier store in Shanghai in September 2023, and says Hema own-label goods went on sale in the United States in June 2024.

How Chinese retailers present themselves.

Chinese retailers and e-commerce platforms present themselves across a wide range of surfaces at once. A single group may run hypermarkets, appliance showrooms, shopping malls, small franchised shops and a shopping app, and each has to carry the same name at very different sizes, from a rooftop sign on a city-centre store to a small icon on a phone. Many of these companies grew from one shop or one website into groups with several store formats, so their names often began with one product category and later had to stretch to cover many.

Naming is often plain and descriptive. Store and company names commonly pair a short brand word with a description of what is sold, such as electrical appliances, and later drop that description as the business widens. Platform names and company names can swap places: a group may rename itself after its own website or app, or give an app a new name and later return to the original one. Chinese characters and an English or pinyin form usually appear side by side, and the two do not always translate each other.

Shopping festivals shape much of the visual calendar. Dates such as 11 November, known as Double Eleven, bring campaign artwork across store windows, app home screens and delivery packaging, usually set around the date itself and the company’s own name. For a designer, the useful material is how the companies publish these campaigns and how the core name holds steady while the seasonal graphics change around it.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. Listed retailers publish their founders, owners and exchange listings in annual results and announcements, and these records also show renamings, store closures and changes of control as dated facts. Read together with independent press, they give a fuller picture of how each name has been used over time.

Fewer formats, more stores.

Not every format lasted. China Daily reported in August 2025 that Hema was leaving the membership-store business: the first Hema X had opened in Shanghai in October 2020, the format had reached ten stores by October 2023, stores in Beijing, Suzhou and Nanjing had shut in late July 2025, and the last, in Shanghai’s Senlan area, would close on 31 August 2025. Management, the paper said, had chosen to concentrate on Freshippo stores and Hema NB, its neighbourhood format. As of August 2025, China Daily put the chain at more than 420 stores; Yicai Global had counted more than 360 outlets in 29 cities in March 2024.

The chain also worked with its sister business RT-Mart. ChinaTalk says Alibaba rolled out Hema’s conveyor belts and home delivery to RT-Mart stores run by Sun Art Retail. Chinese Wikipedia adds that Hema stores in Shenyang, Dalian, Haikou and Sanya were run with Sun Art under a licence that ended in 2024, after which Hema left Liaoning and Hainan, some Liaoning stores reopening under the RT-Mart name.

For a design guide, Freshippo shows a grocery brand whose identity lives as much in an app, a delivery radius and a ceiling rail as on a shop sign. Compare Alibaba, its owner, and RT-Mart, the hypermarket chain that once shared its parent. For this guide we use a deep blue, a pale sky and a citrus yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Freshippo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.