JD.com’s Seven Fresh Kitchen (七鲜小厨) just did something few expected: it opened shop on its rival platform, Meituan (美团). The takeaway kitchen brand now shows up in Meituan searches with free delivery and eligibility for Meituan’s coupons – all perks that change the narrative on the ever-raging local-life wars.
Context matters here: these wars are being fought over increasingly slim slices of market share in the local-life app game. These are platforms that blend online and offline consumption in everything from food delivery to groceries, travel and entertainment. It’s one of the fiercest battlegrounds in China’s digital economy because the country’s internet giants want to capture everyday spending, not just e-commerce clicks.
JD has spent 2025 pushing hard into food delivery, offering restaurants a zero-fee model for using their platforms, as well as launching Seven Fresh Kitchens. All this is in hot competition with Meituan’s own delivery-only kitchen service, Racoon Kitchen (小袋狸厨房) and all the coupons and deals Meituan users get for using that app.
JD isn’t stopping at hot meals. Its newly minted café label, Seven Fresh Coffee (also opened in 2025), has gone live on Meituan too. Expansions like this are likely testing how strong platform cooperation really is when retailers bring their own first-party brands into a rival’s marketplace.
Strategically, listing on Meituan trades purity for reach. It buys traffic in the country’s dominant delivery app while exposing JD to the rules of someone else’s house: commissions, visibility changes, and algorithmic placement. With that in mind, JD’s presence on Meituan could become either a showcase for cooperation or an example of a match not made in heaven.
