A Beijing jelly seller paid for 1,500 fake reviews claiming it melted fat

Xuanyantang Biotech (萱妍堂) sold a fruit jelly through livestream and short-video shops in Beijing — an ordinary food product with no approved health claim attached. To move it faster, the company paid a review farm to flood the product's comment sections with more than 1,500 fabricated reviews, each crediting the jelly with melting fat and slimming the buyer down.

Chinese food-safety law draws a hard line between 普通食品 (ordinary food) and 保健食品 (health food): only the latter, after a registration process, may claim a physiological effect like weight loss. A jelly sold as a snack cannot legally be sold as a diet aid, no matter what the packaging says — so the company routed the claim around the label and into the reviews instead, where an algorithm and a shopper both read them as proof from other buyers.

Beijing's market regulator traced the review farm back to the brand and fined Xuanyantang ¥100,000 in December 2024, one of a batch of livestream-commerce cases the national regulator circulated the following spring as examples of the tactics enforcement was now targeting.