JD built Seven Fresh to counter Hema — 8 years on it closes stores and retreats

Seven Fresh was JD's answer to Hema: founded in April 2017, a network fusing offline supermarkets with self-operated front warehouses. Eight years on it had built just 71 stores — roughly nine a year — with about 40 in Beijing, 10 in Tianjin and 10 in Guangzhou, and over 95% of locations in tier-1 and new tier-1 cities. It fought with price, pitching goods about 10% below competitors, even as management flagged the sustainability of profitability and rivals Hema and Dingdong only just turned profitable.

In mid-2026 the network shrank in its home market: five stores closed within three months — Beijing's Fengtai, Daxing and Fangshan districts, plus core Tianjin locations. The reasons were internal: single-store financial models that didn't clear the bar, leases expiring or rents outrunning revenue, and big-format sites chosen away from community living circles, with narrow customer bases whose revenue never covered rent, labor and cold-chain costs.

The retreat executes a focus set in 2022 — Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Greater Bay Area — now run as 'digging wells instead of casting nets': denser stores around mature communities, shorter delivery radii, lower spoilage. Seven Fresh also took over former RT-Mart space in Beijing, swapping one retreating format's shell for its own. For JD, the supermarket counterattack that began as a Hema challenger ends as a regional optimizer — eight years of capital for two regions, and a site-selection lesson paid in closed doors.