Zhong Xue Gao sold 66-yuan ice cream to a 3-yuan market — from ¥4B to liquidation

Zhong Xue Gao launched in March 2018 as China's premium ice cream brand: sticks priced at 10 yuan and up — its famous Ecuador Pink Diamond at 66 yuan — sold from the same convenience-store freezers as 3-yuan popsicles. The strategy worked long enough: a 200 million yuan Series A in May 2021 valued the company at 4 billion yuan, and over 85% of its sales stayed above 10 yuan.

The backlash arrived in summer 2022, when consumers named it the leading '雪糕刺客' — the ice cream assassin hidden among cheap sticks that stabs your wallet at the register. Days later, videos showing a stick that did not fully melt at 31°C (and would not burn) turned a pricing argument into a safety one. The brand had form: it had already been fined twice, in 2018 and 2019, for misleading claims, including 'premium Turpan red grapes' that were ordinary raisins.

The pricing broke from the bottom. In March 2023 a 3.5-yuan sub-brand arrived too late; by September, third-party sellers were dumping 10-packs at half the official price, and in 2024 a Weibo trend noted the fall from 60 yuan to 2.5. By March 2024 the company had 24 insured employees left, 35 million yuan of equity frozen and more than 50 lawsuits over unpaid wages and debts. In June 2025 a supplier filed its production subsidiary for bankruptcy review; the 50,000 freezers were gone.

Kept premium prices after the 'ice cream assassin' backlash and melt-proof videos; a 3.5-yuan sub-brand came too late, and the ¥4B valuation fell to liquidation.

Premium pricing survived only while the channel hid it — once consumers named the trick, the price itself became the story.

A quality scare on top of a price backlash is unrecoverable: the 'doesn't melt' videos gave the pricing argument a safety vocabulary.

The 2023 price cut admitted the positioning was wrong, but cutting prices after the brand is spent only liquidates it faster.

A premium price needs a premium reason that survives daylight — if the only moat is that buyers did not notice the price, the first viral receipt ends the business.