On August 13, six Beijing municipal departments, including the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau, jointly released a set of measures titled "Several Measures to Promote the Heritage and Development of Time-Honored Brands in the Catering and Food Sectors" (hereafter referred to as the "Measures"). The Measures outline 18 specific initiatives across five key dimensions: protection, inheritance, innovation, development, and management services, aiming to comprehensively support and empower time-honored brands in the catering and food industries.

Targeting common industry pain points such as a generational gap in skill inheritance, a shortage of professional talent, difficulties in brand protection, and outdated operational models, the 18 new policies balance tradition and innovation. They strengthen the preservation of original site appearances, trademarks, and patents, clear career advancement paths for skilled personnel, and support digital transformation, IP collaborations, and new scenario expansion. The goal is to help time-honored brands adapt to new market demands while retaining their cultural essence.

Comprehensive Support

To drive the heritage and development of time-honored brands, relevant authorities have once again taken action. Reports from Beijing Business Today indicate that the Measures, jointly issued by six departments, focus on protection, inheritance, innovation, development, and management services, forming 18 specific measures across five areas. Specifically, the Measures mention improving the collaborative protection ecosystem, including preserving the original appearance of time-honored brand sites and supporting the retention of traditional storefronts. They also aim to safeguard the historical archives of these brands, encouraging enterprises to improve document collection and management. Additionally, they protect trademarks and patents of time-honored brands by monitoring intellectual property infringement and providing related rights protection services. The Measures also seek to uphold fair competition rights, intensifying law enforcement against infringements on brand names and trademark usage.

Furthermore, the Measures innovate sustainable development mechanisms. This includes deepening reforms in state-owned enterprises by using comprehensive reform pilot projects as an opportunity to improve market-oriented personnel selection and assessment incentive systems. It also guides municipal enterprises to strengthen brand licensing management. Emphasizing the inheritance of talent and skills, the Measures focus on improving the training and incentive mechanisms for inheritors. They also aim to enhance digital operational levels, encouraging intelligent and green upgrades and guiding improvements in e-commerce capabilities.

Additionally, a system for renewal and upgrading is included. This promotes the upgrading of core products, encouraging time-honored brands in the catering and food sectors to research and develop products that meet consumer demands. It also fosters brand co-branding collaborations, leveraging IP to enhance brand synergy. The Measures expand integrated consumption scenarios, encouraging time-honored brands to create new scenes such as industrial tourism and "AI + consumption." They also enhance coordination among culture, commerce, tourism, sports, and exhibitions, supporting time-honored brand stores to be registered as tax refund stores to attract inbound tourists and linking with events and exhibitions for promotions.

The Measures further mention expanding brand carrying capacity. This includes strengthening the brand overlay effect by building online and offline product aggregation platforms. They encourage the creation of cultural exhibition spaces, promoting the construction and improvement of museums and exhibition halls by time-honored brands to enhance cultural display and dissemination. They also build overseas service platforms to help enterprises actively connect with international markets.

Moreover, the Measures also point to improving management and service levels. This involves strengthening organizational leadership by leveraging the working mechanism of the leading group for cultivating and building an international consumption center city to coordinate key tasks for promoting time-honored brand development. They implement dynamic management, establishing a regular review and brand withdrawal system to guide the development of time-honored brands in a tiered and categorized manner. They also expand publicity and promotion, using new media and foreign affairs resources to enhance the influence of time-honored brands.

Addressing Bottlenecks

As the most concentrated segment of Beijing's time-honored brand landscape and the one most closely tied to daily life, catering and food time-honored brands carry the city's cultural memory and commercial heritage. However, against the backdrop of consumption iteration and intensifying market competition, their long-accumulated development pain points are becoming increasingly apparent. The introduction of this specialized policy is a precise breakthrough for common industry challenges, driving traditional brands to improve and innovate while adhering to tradition.

With increasing competition in the catering market and evolving consumer demands, the market performance of time-honored brands is showing clear divergence, with the consumer recognition and market competitiveness of some traditional brands weakening. According to surveys by Beijing Business Today, in reputation rankings among younger consumer groups, traditional time-honored brands generally rank lower than localized new brands. For example, in the Beijing roast duck track, on Xiaohongshu's TOP10 list of recommended Beijing roast duck, Siji Minfu ranked first with a 53% recommendation rate, followed by Ziguangyuan, with Dadong and Bianyifang taking third and fourth places. A similar pattern is seen in the copper pot hot pot track. Donglaishun, founded in 1903, shows significant gaps compared to Nanmen Hot Pot, established in 1994, in terms of social media buzz, in-store traffic, and the proportion of young customers. This reflects the lag in product innovation, service experience, and brand rejuvenation among some time-honored brands, making it difficult to meet the needs of current mainstream consumer groups.

The survival pressure on more numerous small and medium-sized private time-honored brands is even more pronounced. A survey of over ten private catering time-honored brands by Beijing Business Today reveals that these brands generally operate with a single-store or small-scale direct-store model. They tend to be small in scale, have limited capital reserves, weak supply chain bargaining power, and poor resilience against market fluctuations. Faced with external variables like rising ingredient costs, fluctuating store rents, and sudden market conditions, the cash flow of these enterprises is generally fragile, and even minor industry fluctuations can lead to significant operational pressure. Meanwhile, most private time-honored brands lack professional operational management and strategic financing capabilities, making it difficult to appraise and increase the value of their intangible brand assets. They struggle to achieve large-scale expansion and systematic upgrades relying solely on their own accumulation.

The Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau stated that the catering and food sectors are the areas with the most concentrated time-honored brands in Beijing and the most closely related to people's daily lives. These brands carry exquisite and unique traditional skills and cultural connotations. However, they still face many problems, such as a weak awareness of proactive change, a generational gap in skill inheritance, insufficient product innovation, and a mismatch between business models and market demand. By introducing specific policies, the aim is to guide time-honored brands to maintain tradition while innovating, preserving traditional flavors while adapting to modern consumer needs, making them an important force in promoting consumption and developing local brands.

Industry insiders believe that the introduction of this specialized policy provides a clear development path and policy support for Beijing's catering and food time-honored brands, representing a systematic response to long-standing industry pain points. However, policy support is only external assistance. For time-honored brands to truly rejuvenate, enterprises themselves must take the initiative to adapt to market changes, continuously innovating in products, operations, and branding while adhering to their core quality.

Multi-Party Support

In 2018, the General Office of the Beijing Municipal People's Government issued a notice on "Opinions on Promoting the Heritage and Development of Beijing's Time-Honored Brands," gradually improving the city's protection and promotion system for time-honored brands through five major projects: consolidation and strengthening, cultural promotion, brand protection, innovative development, and reform and efficiency. Now, the issuance of the Measures has injected another boost into the development of time-honored brands.

The Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau stated that Beijing has always attached great importance to the inheritance, protection, innovation, and development of time-honored brands. The policies released this year continue to adhere to the principles of balancing tradition and innovation, and combining government guidance with market leadership. They focus on protection, inheritance, innovation, development, and management services. On one hand, they strengthen the protection of traditional skills, original sites and appearances, talent training, and brand trademarks. On the other hand, they encourage technological upgrades, product innovation, digital improvement, and scene integration, deeply promoting the tradition-preserving innovation of time-honored brands in the catering and food sectors. The aim is to fully leverage the positive role of time-honored brands in consumption leadership, cultural heritage, and brand building.

Yuan Shuai, co-founding initiator of the XinZhiPai New Quality Productivity Living Room, noted that amid the drastic changes in the current consumption environment, many time-honored brands are encountering development bottlenecks. First, there is a lag in market adaptability. Consumer demand has shifted from basic functional satisfaction to personalized, experiential, and quality-oriented needs. Many time-honored brands still adhere to traditional product forms and business models, lacking awareness of the preferences of younger consumers. Their product update cycles are slow, making it difficult to integrate into the daily consumption scenarios of young people. Second, many consumers still perceive time-honored brands as "nostalgic gifts" or "exclusive to the older generation," with an outdated and rigid brand image. Additionally, some time-honored brands are long confined to single business formats, failing to fully release the value of their cultural IP. Their exploration in areas like scene integration and cross-border collaboration is insufficient. The originally rich cultural heritage has not been transformed into consumer appeal; instead, it has become a burden hindering innovation, making it difficult to find new growth drivers in the trend of cultural, commercial, and tourism integration.

Indeed, in the development process of time-honored brands, enterprises themselves need to proactively plan around new consumer demands to polish their golden brand signboards. Furthermore, in addition to relevant departments providing guidance, industry associations and other multi-party entities also need to work together to safeguard the long-term development of time-honored brands.

"The introduction of the 'Measures' has pointed the way for the development of time-honored brands," Yuan Shuai said. "But to truly turn policy dividends into development outcomes, catering and food time-honored brands and industry practitioners need to take the initiative and make sustained efforts from multiple dimensions." Yuan Shuai believes that time-honored brands need to deeply study the consumption preferences of contemporary consumers, especially the younger generation, and increase investment in product research and development to break the stereotypes consumers hold about them. At the same time, time-honored brands should actively explore the possibility of cross-border collaboration, fully tap their IP value, and actively carry out brand co-branding collaborations. This would combine the cultural heritage of time-honored brands with trendy elements from other fields to create new content and products that align with current consumption hotspots. Moreover, not only time-honored brands but also industry associations should fully play their role as a bridge, building platforms for exchange and cooperation between time-honored brands and with enterprises in other business formats. They should share market information and innovation experiences, guiding the entire industry to explore innovative paths together while adhering to tradition, thus forming a cluster effect for the development of time-honored brands.