After a previous public dispute with Luo Yonghao about prepared dishes, Xibei Catering Group fell into a huge public controversy. Since then, the internal crisis of this well-known catering company has accelerated, and hidden worries have gradually surfaced.
The latest news shows that Xibei has issued a formal notice internally, planning to initiate large-scale layoffs across the country and simultaneously close a large number of underperforming stores in an attempt to maintain survival by reducing scale.
According to internal emails, Xibei Group has recently made significant adjustments to its management. Although Jia Guolong still serves as the CEO in the system, Dong Junyi has been appointed as the group president, responsible for the overall operational management of domestic business.
Behind this personnel change is extremely severe financial pressure. Jia Guolong revealed in previous internal communications that from September 2025 to March 2026, Xibei’s cumulative losses are expected to exceed 600 million yuan.
In order to reverse the situation, Xibei plans to close 102 stores nationwide in the first quarter of this year. This number accounts for about 30% of its total number of stores, which means that the brand is undergoing an extremely tragic strategic contraction.
This severe contraction has had a direct and heavy impact on grassroots employees. A working store manager in Xibei reported that he had suffered continuous salary cuts in the past two months and was eventually forced to resign.
According to the store manager, when he went to the Beijing headquarters to negotiate compensation issues, he did not receive a substantive solution. Instead, he was told that he could apply for labor arbitration. At present, he has not completed the resignation procedures and has not received compensation.
What is regrettable is that just a month ago, Xibei had just completed its Series A financing and won the favor of capital including Xinrongji founder Zhang Yong and former Alibaba partner Hu Xiaoming. The registered capital also increased by about 13%.
However, even with abundant capital, it seems that it has not been able to effectively alleviate the survival anxiety of grassroots employees. The injection of capital and the depletion of cash flow at the grassroots level form a sharp contrast within the same company.
For Xibei, closing hundreds of stores and laying off thousands of employees may be a desperate attempt to survive in the cold winter of the industry. But beneath this grand narrative are the life risks that countless ordinary employees must face independently.
This change involving the whole company reflects the difficulty of traditional catering giants under the double attack of transformation pressure and public opinion crisis. How to find a balance between capital games and employee rights and interests has become the most difficult problem for Xibei at present.