60+ Countries Are Discovering Chinese Latiao Spicy Strips As A Global Snack Phenomenon Reshapes the Industry
Discover how Chinese latiao spicy strips reached 160+ countries. Learn about the $8.9B industry, Weilong’s growth, and this viral snack’s global impact.
SEO Title: Chinese Latiao Spicy Strips | 160 Countries, 8.9B Industry
Deck: Chinese latiao spicy strips — the chewy, fiery wheat-flour snacks born from a 1998 flood disaster in Hunan — have reached consumers in more than 160 countries as of mid-2026, with the domestic industry now valued at over 60 billion yuan (US$8.9 billion) and leading producer Weilong posting a 50 percent jump in overseas sales.
Dating to a flood-devastated county in China’s Hunan province in 1998, Chinese latiao spicy strips have travelled far beyond their emergency-ration origins. By June 2026, when AFP correspondents visited the production hub of Pingjiang, the snack had graduated from supermarket shelves across China to specialist grocery stores in the United States, e-commerce warehouses serving Australia, and the algorithmic feeds of TikTok users on at least six continents. The domestic industry supporting that journey is valued at more than 60 billion yuan (US$8.9 billion), according to figures cited by manufacturers operating in Hunan. Organised around a cluster of Pingjiang-based factories and co-driven by a wave of online enthusiasm for Chinese culture — widely tagged on social media as “Chinamaxxing” — the sector has received growing commercial attention from export markets in East and Southeast Asia, where latiao brands are expanding rapidly. The largest publicly listed producer, Hong Kong-listed Weilong, recorded 117 million yuan in overseas sales last year, nearly 50 percent above its 2024 figure. The spicy strips trend is anchored in part by Mala Wangzi, one of the sector’s most visible domestic operators, whose vice president Li Manliang confirmed to AFP that latiao are “now exported to more than 160 countries worldwide, showing that the market is moving increasingly towards internationalisation.”
One Week Out And Pingjiang’s Factories Are Already Running At Full Tilt
With global demand accelerating through the first half of 2026, Pingjiang’s production floors show little sign of idle time. At the Mala Wangzi facility visited by AFP in June 2026, masked workers in white uniforms season and sift through mounds of freshly extruded strips — the plant producing nearly 700 tonnes per day of the spongy, red-coloured product. Booking data from cross-border e-commerce platforms has tracked consistent volume growth, while TikTok and Instagram feeds continue filling with unboxing and taste-test videos that function as unpaid advertising for the entire category.
This is not a simple junk-food revival story. The latiao category has quietly restructured itself into something considerably more layered: a food-safety reform effort, a cultural export vehicle, a youth marketing machine, and a cross-border commerce experiment running simultaneously across 160 markets. The convergence of those four forces — rather than any single viral video — explains why factory output in a mid-sized Hunan county is now a subject of international trade analysis.
From Flood Staple To TikTok Sensation, Nearly Three Decades Of Snack History Are Unfolding At Once
Latiao were created in Pingjiang in 1998 as an emergency staple food, after devastating floods wiped out the local soybean crop, leaving food producers scrambling for an affordable, high-pressure-cooked wheat alternative. The snack’s operating logic is straightforward: wheat flour dough is cooked at high temperature and pressure, then seasoned — typically with chilli oil, salt, sugar and a range of spice blends — to produce the chewy, pungent strips that became ubiquitous across Chinese supermarkets through the 2000s.
Vendor categories in the current market divide broadly into four segments: mass-market domestic brands selling through convenience chains; premium and reformulated products targeting health-conscious younger consumers; export-focused operations shipping to diaspora grocery networks in North America, Europe and Oceania; and branded experience retailers running pop-up museums and themed retail environments. Mala Wangzi has pursued all four simultaneously. According to the company’s public statements and AFP reporting, Mala Wangzi has held more than 4,000 latiao-themed weddings for superfan couples and sponsored e-sports events, music festivals and animation conventions to lock in its primary consumer base of buyers aged 18 to 30.
The sensory programme extends to factory tourism. An employee at the Pingjiang plant livestreamed the production floor during AFP’s visit to demonstrate hygiene conditions to online audiences — a format that functions both as quality assurance and as content marketing for the viral snack category. Li Manliang, Mala Wangzi’s vice president, stated that hygiene standards at the facility are modelled on pharmaceutical industry protocols. The company has also reformulated its recipe, he said, reducing oil, salt, sugar and additives while increasing natural ingredients — a direct response to the category’s long-standing reputation for being unhealthy and unsanitary.
Behind The 60 Billion Yuan Valuation Is An Experiment In ‘Viral Export Commerce’
The real story here is not the size of the domestic industry, but the mechanism converting social media attention into cross-border revenue at scale. Consumers in export markets are not simply finding latiao in Chinese grocery aisles. They are encountering the product through a layered discovery chain: TikTok reaction videos, Instagram unboxings, e-commerce platform search results, and word-of-mouth in diaspora communities — often in that sequence.
The numbers behind that chain are specific. One influencer accumulated 1.5 million views by eating a model house constructed entirely from latiao strips. An Australian reviewer’s TikTok response to a giant latiao format reached 2.6 million views; her verdict — “If you can handle your spice, I think you would enjoy this. Highly, highly recommend” — functioned as a direct conversion prompt for viewers browsing the same platform. A separate foreign reviewer’s video, describing latiao as “kind of like chewy tofu” and “very oily,” attracted 2.8 million views, demonstrating that ambivalent reviews generate comparable reach to positive ones.
The platforms enabling that reach — TikTok, Instagram and China’s domestic short-video ecosystem — have become the primary distribution surface for Chinese snack culture exports. For top-performing brands, the progression path runs from viral content to e-commerce shelf placement to physical retail in specialist grocery stores. Weilong’s 117 million yuan in overseas revenue last year, up nearly 50 percent from 2024, represents the financial output of that funnel operating at scale. The strategic ambition across the sector is to shift latiao from a one-off novelty snack into an embedded, recurring purchase habit in non-Chinese consumer households — a transition that requires both continued content visibility and sustained investment in food-safety credibility.
Pingjiang’s Production Scale Gives The Export Push A Natural Supply-Chain Base
The choice of Pingjiang as the industry’s geographic anchor is itself a strategic decision worth noting. The county’s existing manufacturing concentration means that individual brands do not need to build supply infrastructure from scratch — they inherit a cluster of specialist suppliers, seasoning producers and packaging operations that have been refining the latiao format since 1998.
At the Mala Wangzi plant, that infrastructure produces nearly 700 tonnes of finished product daily — all of it, at the time of AFP’s June 2026 visit, directed at the domestic market. Sourcing materials and company statements project cumulative export capacity growing as international demand increases, with Li Manliang citing 160 destination countries as the current distribution footprint. The official external figure from Weilong’s financial disclosures places overseas sales at 117 million yuan for the most recent full year. Public information confirms the category is jointly driven by domestic mass-market demand and a separate, accelerating export channel that did not exist in any meaningful form before 2020.
Consumer sentiment within China reflects the ongoing rehabilitation of the category’s reputation. “When I was young, my parents believed they contained too many additives,” 22-year-old Beijing resident Wang Jingfei told AFP. “But as the industry has developed and more brands have emerged, food safety has drawn a lot of attention, so I don’t think it’s a big problem to eat it now and then.” Not all domestic consumers have reconciled with the snack: Li Peng, 22, told AFP he had stopped eating latiao he had consumed regularly in his school days, citing a preference for a healthier lifestyle. The reformulation push — reducing oil and additives, increasing natural ingredients — is still in progress at multiple producers, with no industry-wide standard yet confirmed at time of writing.
Frequently Asked Questions About Chinese Latiao Spicy Strips
What are Chinese latiao spicy strips made of? Chinese latiao spicy strips are made by cooking wheat flour dough at high temperature and pressure, then seasoning the resulting chewy strips with chilli oil, salt, sugar and spice blends. They are neither meat-based nor tofu-based, though some foreign reviewers have compared their texture to chewy tofu.
Where were latiao invented, and when? Latiao were invented in Pingjiang county in Hunan province, central China, in 1998. They were originally developed as an emergency staple food after catastrophic floods that year destroyed the local soybean harvest, forcing food producers to find an alternative ingredient.
How large is the Chinese latiao industry in 2026? The Chinese latiao industry is valued at more than 60 billion yuan, equivalent to approximately US$8.9 billion, based on figures cited by manufacturers in Hunan province as of mid-2026.
Which countries can you buy latiao spicy strips in? According to Mala Wangzi vice president Li Manliang, latiao are exported to more than 160 countries worldwide as of 2026. International consumers can find them in specialist Asian grocery stores, on e-commerce platforms, and through social-commerce channels including TikTok, particularly in the United States, Australia, and across East and Southeast Asia.
Who is the largest latiao producer, and how fast are overseas sales growing? Hong Kong-listed Weilong is China’s largest latiao producer. The company reported 117 million yuan in overseas sales for the most recent full year, a figure that represents a nearly 50 percent increase from its 2024 overseas revenue.
Are latiao spicy strips considered healthy? Latiao have historically carried a reputation as unhealthy junk food high in oil, salt, sugar and additives. Major producers including Mala Wangzi have been reformulating their products since at least 2025, reducing those ingredients and increasing natural components, though the reformulation process is ongoing and no industry-wide nutritional standard has been confirmed. Younger Chinese consumers interviewed by AFP in 2026 expressed cautiously improved views of the snack’s safety profile.
Why are latiao going viral internationally in 2026? International interest in latiao has been driven primarily by short-video content on TikTok and Instagram, where reaction and taste-test videos have accumulated millions of views. The trend is connected to broader online interest in Chinese culture, referred to on social media as “Chinamaxxing.” Individual videos have reached between 1.5 million and 2.8 million views, converting viewer curiosity into product searches on e-commerce platforms.
A Hunan County Snack, Now A Global Conversation
What began as a flood-era improvisation in Pingjiang has become one of the more unexpected cross-border food stories of 2026. The Chinese latiao spicy strips category has moved from domestic ubiquity to a verified 160-country export footprint in under a decade, propelled by the same short-video infrastructure that has carried K-beauty tutorials and Korean street food to global audiences before it. The industry’s 60 billion yuan domestic valuation provides the production base; the viral content economy provides the discovery channel; and a genuine consumer appetite — documented from Beijing to Sydney — provides the sustained demand. Whether the sector’s ongoing food-safety and recipe reforms will consolidate that interest into long-term purchase loyalty remains the open question, but the direction of travel, as measured by Weilong’s 50 percent overseas revenue jump, points clearly outward.
For more information on Chinese latiao spicy strips and the Hunan snack industry, the following sources provided the reporting basis for this article:
- Mala Wangzi official presence: Pingjiang county, Hunan province, China
- Weilong Delicious Global Holdings: Listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; investor relations disclosures available via HKEX
- Original AFP reporting: Filed from Pingjiang, Hunan, June 17, 2026
- Social media coverage: TikTok (@multiple creators, searchable under #latiao and #Chinamaxxing) and Instagram
Readers seeking to purchase latiao internationally are advised to search specialist Asian grocery retailers and major e-commerce platforms including Amazon, Lazada and Shopee, where multiple Weilong and Mala Wangzi SKUs are listed for cross-border delivery.
