Laoxiangji Brand Guidelines: Hefei’s Feixi Old Hen Chain, Renamed Laoxiangji in 2012

A chicken breeder, a short course and a county dish.

Laoxiangji (老乡鸡, pinyin Lǎoxiāng jī) is a Chinese fast-food chain headquartered in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province. English Wikipedia glosses the name as “Hometown Chicken” and gives the company’s English trade name as Home Original Chicken, the name the trade title Verdict Foodservice also used in January 2025. The holding company that applied for a stock-market listing that month is LXJ International, and in Singapore the brand is written Lausanjee, according to QSR Media Asia in June 2026.

The founder is Shu Congxuan. English Wikipedia describes him as a chicken breeder who decided to start a fast-food chain after attending a three-day course in 1999, and gives 2003 as the year the company was established. Verdict Foodservice traces the business further back, to 1982 in Anhui, describing a chicken farm that grew into a restaurant chain, with its first restaurant opening in 2002. The accounts measure different starting points — the farm, the first restaurant and the incorporated company — so both are given here.

The chain’s first name came from the country west of Hefei. It traded as Feixi Lao Mu Ji (肥西老母鸡), “Feixi old hen,” after a stewed-chicken dish linked to Feixi county; English Wikipedia notes that the company’s early English rendering was “FEIXI The Old Hens.” A page on Hefei food published by China Daily in January 2020 describes the Feixi dish as a hen of more than a year old, often the local Mahuang breed, stewed for a long time until its flavour passes into the soup, and quotes a local saying, “Feidong to Feixi, buy an old hen.”

English Wikipedia says the full corporate name of that period carried the Feixi old-hen name, and that the company was then based in a shopping mall in Hefei before moving its headquarters to another part of the city.

From a county name to a hometown name.

The name the chain carries today came out of a deliberate change. According to English Wikipedia, a consulting firm suggested in 2011 that the restaurants be renamed. Its reasons were practical: a three-character name would be shorter than the five-character original, and diners from other provinces were unfamiliar with the old name. The chain took the name Laoxiangji in March 2012. English Wikipedia records an initial outcry when the restaurants changed their signs, and says the company continued to grow after the switch.

The change kept the bird and dropped the county. “Feixi old hen” tied the brand to one dish from one place near Hefei; “Laoxiangji” keeps chicken at the centre of the name while replacing the place with a word for home town. Read side by side, the two names record the shift: the original names the place the recipe comes from, and the new one names a home town in general.

The restaurant count shows how far the renamed chain travelled. English Wikipedia says the company had more than 240 restaurants in Anhui in 2015. By 30 September 2024, according to the figures Verdict Foodservice reported in January 2025, it had 1,404 restaurants — 949 self-operated and 455 franchised — across 53 cities in nine Chinese provinces. In June 2026, QSR Media Asia reported that the chain operated more than 1,600 restaurants in over 50 cities in China, through a mix of company-owned and franchised outlets.

The mix matters for the brand. A chain run mostly by its own staff, with a growing franchised share, has to hold one look and one menu across hundreds of rooms run by different operators. The company’s own plans, as Verdict Foodservice summarised them in January 2025, pointed at the same concerns: the money it hoped to raise was meant to strengthen the restaurant network and an integrated supply chain, widen the menu, improve the dining experience, and build up its digital and “intelligent” technology.

Category context.

China’s tea-drink, coffee, burger and restaurant chains present themselves first at street level. A shopfront, a cup and a paper bag are often the first things a customer sees of the brand, and many chains add a mascot, a theme song or a recurring character that appears on signs, packaging and social media at the same time. Some keep their shops small and built for takeaway; others put the same care into seating, lighting and a bakery counter as into the drinks.

Menus are usually organised by named drinks and dishes rather than by codes. Fruit teas, cheese-topped teas, lemon drinks, soft-serve ice cream, fried chicken and hotpot appear under house names, and chains that move abroad often add local flavours while keeping the core list the same. The names, the cups and the colours of the shop carry the brand from one city to the next.

The size of a network is something these companies publish themselves, in annual reports, listing documents and on their own sites, and the press repeats those counts with a date attached. Some chains run every shop directly; others rely mainly on franchisees, and several have moved from one model to the other. Store networks now reach Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe and North America as well as the home market.

Ownership is usually set out plainly on corporate pages: who founded the business and where, which group owns it now, and whether its shares trade in Hong Kong, on a mainland exchange or in New York. This guide follows those published facts, attributes counts to dated sources, and treats each chain’s visual identity as a design subject rather than a claim about its food or drinks.

A Singapore partner.

The brand reached Singapore through a partner. In June 2026, QSR Media Asia reported that Jumbo Group had formed a joint venture in Singapore through its wholly owned subsidiary Jumbo F&B Services with Laoxiangji Holdings Pte. Ltd. to run Chinese-style quick-service restaurants under the Lausanjee name. Laoxiangji Holdings took 51 per cent and Jumbo’s subsidiary 49 per cent. The report said Laoxiangji Holdings holds the rights to the Lausanjee trademarks and trade names in Singapore and grants the venture the use of the brand through a franchise agreement, and that the venture’s three-member board has two directors appointed by the Laoxiangji side and one by Jumbo.

That spelling is worth noting for anyone setting the name in type. On the mainland the brand appears as 老乡鸡, with Laoxiangji as the pinyin and Home Original Chicken as the English trade name; in Singapore the partners chose Lausanjee, a romanisation that reads differently from standard pinyin. One company therefore travels under at least three Latin-alphabet names, and a design system for it has to decide which one leads in each market.

For a design guide, Laoxiangji shows how a regional chain can trade a place name for a broader one while keeping the dish that started it. Compare KFC, another chicken chain built on a founder’s recipe, and Yonghe King, a Chinese fast-food chain with its own regional roots. For this guide we use broth gold, soy brown and a chili red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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