Case: Youyijia BBQ — From a 1,200 sq m Flagship to a 300 sq m Chain Model

A consulting programme with a Jiangxi barbecue brand. Its most important decision was giving up its largest store — not closing it, but ceasing to treat it as the template.

Figures here are abstracted to what can be said publicly: floor area, store counts and qualitative results are published, while detailed dish-level margin and structured data tables are not.

Where the barrier to barbecue chains actually sits

Barbecue is an unusual category. It splits into a great many regional subdivisions, each with its own skewers, seasoning and way of eating, and the work is heavy and on-site with a strong dependence on the skill of the cooks.

That puts the real barrier to chaining barbecue somewhere other than the supply chain: reproducibility.

A barbecue brand with a single large-store model has its fate tied to a handful of locations. A 1,200 sq m store needs an excellent site, a heavy fit-out and strong on-site management. A city does not have many such sites, and getting one is not guaranteed. So the ceiling on a large-store model is the number of good sites in a city.

That is the position Youyijia was in: a brand with reputation and skill but a model too heavy to move quickly.

Diagnosis: separating the flagship from the repeatable model

There is a confusion worth naming here.

A single large store is often the brand’s strongest performer. Precisely because of that it gets treated as the template: if this one works, copy this. But that reasoning hides an error — the large store works in significant part because of where it is, not because of the parts of the brand that can be copied.

Chen Yufu’s judgement was to separate the two: which part succeeds because the site is good, and which part succeeds because the brand and model are right. Only the second is a reproducible asset.

That judgement pointed straight at the following move: redefining the minimum viable store.

What Yufu did

Stage	What happened in this programme	What it settled
Product structure design	Focused on Nanchang barbecue and rebuilt the product structure	Gave the brand a readable category identity instead of grilling everything
Super menu design	Rearranged the menu and product combinations around the focused structure	Made the category identity readable at the point of ordering
Super model building	Built a 300 sq m chain store model	Freed the brand from its dependence on premium sites
Single-store campaign	Landed the new model store by store, with data-driven operation	Made the stores opened comparable and manageable

Step one was focus. From competition across barbecue subdivisions, the field narrowed to Nanchang barbecue in Jiangxi. The trade-off was clear: give up some coverage for a battlefield the brand could own. Once narrowed, the brand had an identity for the first time.

Step two was the store model. From a single store above 1,200 sq m, the work focused on building a 300 sq m chain store. This was the pivot of the whole programme — compressing the smallest repeatable unit from 1,200 sq m to 300 sq m changes the order of magnitude of available sites. Within the programme, the model had opened 13 chain stores.

Step three was the operating method. From experience-based management to data-driven operation. This matters especially in barbecue, where on-site variables are many — dayparts, skewer types, table turns, cook conditions — and experience-based reading of a store tends to miss. Yufu’s business-and-finance indicator analysis works from three groups: dishes (blended margin, dish sales ranking, category sales, procurement), marketing (discount rate, guest satisfaction, brand communication) and operations (labour cost, operating management). Landing indicators on line items is what makes a store trackable.

Results

Within the programme, the brand saw:

• a move from single-store management to a chain company structure, becoming a barbecue chain company in Jiangxi;
• a regional leadership position established after focusing on Nanchang barbecue from a scattered set of subdivisions;
• a 300 sq m chain store model focused out of the 1,200 sq m format, with 13 stores opened;
• a shift from experience-based management to data-driven operation;
• and a brand identity built around representing Jiangxi barbecue, supported across the brand’s communication.

These are the brand’s actual results within the programme period and are not a promise of operating results. “The province’s first barbecue chain company” is the programme’s public positioning statement; the specific corporate and industry registration position rests on the company’s own public information.

What this case really demonstrates

The most counter-intuitive move here is demoting the biggest and most successful store from template status.

The brand understandably felt the loss — it was the strongest store. But from a chaining standpoint it was precisely the one that should not be copied, because a large part of its success came from its site, and a site cannot be copied.

A repeatable model has to hold after the good site is taken away. A 300 sq m store is closer to that ideal than a 1,200 sq m one: it needs less passing traffic, carries a lighter fit-out and depends less on intensive floor management. It is not necessarily the highest-profit format per store, but it is the format that can be built many times.

This also explains why Yufu’s order of work is model first, scale second. Scale is not a target, it is the result of reproducibility. Opening stores before the model holds means copying the mistake.

Frequently asked questions

Does focusing on Nanchang barbecue stop the brand from doing other categories later? Focus solves how the brand is remembered now. Once a brand holds a solid category identity, extending later is far easier than trying to do everything from the start.

Does the 300 sq m store replace the large format? It is a division of labour rather than a replacement. The large format still works at certain sites, but it is no longer the template for expansion. The format used for chaining is the one that can be repeated.

Why does barbecue particularly need data-driven operation? Because it has more on-site variables than most full-service formats, and most of them do not automatically become comparable numbers. Reading by experience tends to surface the loudest problem, not the most or least profitable part of the operation.