No. 5 Jiushen Liquor (酒神酒行)
1,200 stores
Jiushen Liquor is one of the godfathers of chain-based bulk baijiu. Its story starts in 1993, selling northeastern-style loose liquor in the coastal cities of Yantai and Qingdao; the headquarters moved to Jinan in 1997, and Jinan Jiushen Industrial Co., Ltd. was formally incorporated in 2002—among the first companies to turn the scruffy bulk trade into a chain.
The model centers on bulk baijiu, led by everyday products like northeastern sorghum liquor, and grows through a single brand, a shared supply chain, and franchising. Where loose liquor was once the domain of mom-and-pop shops, Jiushen standardized and branded it to cover a range of price points. Its network now stretches across Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Jiangsu, Anhui, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Beijing, and Tianjin—more than 20 provincial-level markets in all—anchored in the north and northeast, and one of the earliest bulk chains to cross provincial lines.
Map of China showing the headquarters cities of the top 20 liquor retail chains; bubble size shows how many are based in each city, with Beijing the largest at six.
Chains based in city:
1
2
6
Italicised (*): HQ inferred from the chain’s main operating region; only province-level location disclosed. Source: China Alcoholic Drinks Association.
No. 4 Noble Family (名品世家)
1,500 stores
Founded in 2008 in Beijing, Noble Family was one of the early believers in the chain-franchise model for Chinese liquor. Its pitch—”sell only the genuine product, specialize in famous brands”—speaks to a real anxiety in a market long plagued by counterfeits. It grows through company-owned stores, franchising, and online platforms, with franchising doing most of the work. The company listed on the New Third Board in 2016, delisted in January 2024, and has been angling for a Hong Kong listing ever since—a goal it pushed forward this year when its founder bought control of a Hong Kong-listed company, a classic backdoor-listing maneuver.
Today it is one of the country’s larger chain platforms, with operations in nearly 30 provinces and close to 3,000 stores and outlets. Its product range is wide: partnerships with leading baijiu makers including Moutai, Wuliangye, Luzhou Laojiao, Yanghe, Guotai, and the Renhuai sauce-aroma group, plus imported wine such as the Australian label Auswan (天鹅庄), and brandy, yellow rice wine, and imported beer.
The business has stayed profitable through a brutal stretch for the industry. Revenue ran about 1.02 billion yuan (US$142 million) in 2020, 1.34 billion yuan (US$186 million) in 2021, and 1.05 billion yuan (US$146 million) in 2022, with underlying net profit of roughly 79 million yuan (US$10.97 million), 120 million yuan (US$16.67 million), and 85 million yuan (US$11.81 million) respectively—even as it kept expanding franchises and digital systems.
The capital maneuvering has been busy. On February 9 this year, Hong Kong-listed printer Global Printing announced that Noble Family founder and chairman Chen Minghui had bought about 65.54% of it for roughly HK$22.89 million through a wholly owned vehicle—echoing a near-identical move by Yang Lingjiang, chairman of list-topping 1919. Chen called the deal part of Noble Family’s digital strategy; the market reads it as a door left open for future financial engineering.
No. 3 Vats Liquor (华致酒行)
2,000 stores
Vats Liquor is the blue-chip name in Chinese liquor distribution—one of the few players listed on the mainland’s A-share market—selling baijiu, imported wine, and spirits, with strategic ties to giants like Kweichow Moutai, Wuliangye, Shanxi Fenjiu, Lafite, and Penfolds.
Its reach is genuinely everywhere: branded chain stores, independent retailers, big-box “key account” hypermarkets, corporate-gifting and bulk channels, and e-commerce, backed by more than 40 warehouses nationwide totaling over 50,000 square meters. As on-demand delivery has taken hold, Vats has wired its stores into Meituan, JD.com, Douyin (China’s TikTok), and Taobao, promising drinks “in as little as 15 minutes.”
The headline figures were ugly in 2025: revenue down 37.7% to 5.895 billion yuan (about US$819 million), and a net loss attributable to shareholders of 369 million yuan (about US$51.25 million). Wine, though, held up far better. Sales there dipped just 4.17% to 403 million yuan (about US$56 million), while volume actually rose 17.34% to 2.49 million liters—more bottles out the door even as prices came under pressure. Vats handpicks more than 500 wines from around the world and partners with both Treasury Wine Estates and Domaines Barons de Rothschild Lafite.
No. 2 Urbrew (优布劳精酿酒馆)
3,000 stores
Urbrew was one of the first in China to wed craft beer to chain retail. Founded in 2013, headquartered in Beijing and brewing out of Handan, Hebei, it set out to crack the problems that kept craft beer a niche pleasure—too pricey, too hard to find, drunk too rarely—by building its own brewery, supply chain, and franchise network to push craft into ordinary neighborhoods. By most counts it is now one of China’s largest craft-beer chains.
Its signature move is “freshly drawn craft.” A 2017 fresh-keg flash-delivery service took the kind of draft beer you’d normally get only at a bar and pushed it through delivery apps and corner stores, eventually growing into a “fresh-pour + craft + tavern + new-retail” system. After 2021, Urbrew turned its outlets into “Urbrew Craft Taverns,” blending beer on tap, self-serve fill stations, light bites, and a place to sit into something part shop, part bar.
The parallel to the daojiupu boom is obvious: by ditching the high rent, staffing, and fit-out of a traditional bar, Urbrew dragged beer out of the nightlife economy and into the neighborhood. You can drink in, but most customers fill up and carry out—to a restaurant, or home. And it has scaled fast: by 2025, more than 2,000 taverns across 800-plus cities and districts, over 100 million cups sold a year, and 500-plus new partners signed in the first half of 2025 alone. Having ticked off its “hundred cities, thousand stores” goal, it is now chasing “thousand cities, ten thousand stores.”
Urbrew’s rise mirrors a bigger shift in how China drinks. A decade ago, craft beer meant independent bars and specialist taprooms in first-tier cities. Now chains like Urbrew—plus a wave of neighborhood on-tap shops, fresh-beer stands, and craft bottle shops—have pulled freshly poured craft into the mainstream. As delivery and neighborhood retail mature, this cheap, easily copied tavern format has become one of the most closely watched new ideas in the drinks business.
No. 1 1919
3,532 stores
The 1919 Group, founded in 2006 and based in Chengdu, is the closest thing China has to a national big-box liquor chain—a homegrown answer to a Total Wine—selling baijiu, wine, beer, and even tobacco. Counting company-owned and franchised outlets together, it runs more than 5,000 stores, which by store count makes it one of the largest liquor retail chains on earth.
It once traded on the New Third Board before delisting in 2023, a move it said was meant to cut costs and speed up decision-making in line with its long-term plans. Before delisting, it had posted 2022 revenue of 4.714 billion yuan (about US$655 million), up 2.28% on the year, and its platform sales crossed 10 billion yuan (about US$1.389 billion) in 2023. An early mover in “liquor plus internet,” 1919 has run flagship stores on Alibaba’s Tmall while leaning on its store network – it offered “19-minute delivery” a decade ago, long before that was normal and in 2018 – took a 2-billion-yuan (about US$278 million) strategic investment from Alibaba at a 7-billion-yuan (about US$972 million) valuation.
Its latest move points beyond retail. In December 2025, chairman and general manager Yang Lingjiang paid about HK$156 million for 589 million shares of Hong Kong-listed Grace Vineyard, a 73.63% controlling stake, as we have reported. Yang has since floated an “F2B2C drinks operating system,” under which Grace Vineyard would expand from wine into baijiu, whisky, Japanese sake, craft beer, and ready-to-drink cocktails. Since 1919 already owns several of its own baijiu and wine labels, the winery’s new direction slots neatly into the platform-and-brand strategy the company has spent years building toward.
See all the top 80 drinks retailer in China here.
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