Bao Caisheng, the founder of Master Bao, comes from Zixi County, Jiangxi Province, the "hometown of bread".

Bao Caisheng was born in Jiangxi and his ancestral home is Zhejiang. In the 1960s, his parents immigrated from Qiandao Lake, Hangzhou, Zhejiang to Zixi County, Jiangxi. In 1974, Bao Caisheng was born here. In the late 1980s, Zixi started a bread-making craze. More than 40,000 people in the small county were making bread across the country. Bao Caisheng's parents also jumped on the trend and learned how to make bread. Soon after, they borrowed money to open a bakery in Anhui. A bakery.

From then on, Bao Caisheng ran forward and backward. In his impression, his mother at that time often worked until dawn. This was his first impression of baking.

In 1995, Bao Caisheng went to Henan to study. Due to family influence, he opened a bakery in Zhengzhou and later started a baking raw material business. However, the first time he worked alone did not surprise him. He even lost a lot of money and got into debt. Stubborn, he went to Xinyang and continued his bread business until 2004, when he paid off all his debts.

In 2004, Bao Caisheng and his wife came to Beijing and opened a "Baozi Western Cake House" on Dingfuzhuang North Street next to the Communication University of China, selling bread and pastries. It was a very traditional mom-and-pop store model, a stall shop of 20 to 30 square meters, with bulk pastries on display in the small front. Although there were not many chain bakeries at that time, the categories sold were all very similar. No one thought that Master Bao, who would become popular in the future, came from here.

In the second year after founding Baozi, Bao Caisheng developed a new product - Xiaobei cake. This signature product became popular as soon as it was launched. It was also that year, considering that Bao Zai would always grow old, Bao Caisheng changed his name to "Master Bao".

Because it is close to the school, Master Bao’s business is pretty good, but Bao Caisheng is always worried: If there is no distinctiveness, he will surely fall into homogeneous competition in the future. The popularity of the pork floss and Xiaobei allowed him to find a breakthrough. At that time, this product accounted for half of the sales in Master Bao's store. Bao Caisheng felt: "If another bakery is opened, there will be Holiland, Weiduo Mei, etc. all over Beijing." brand, we might as well create special snacks around cakes."

In 2008, Bao Caisheng and his wife opened a new store near the Yonghe Temple in the Second Ring Road of Beijing, with the "Master Bao Pastry" sign, and the pork floss Xiaobei continued. Popular. Fast forward to 2013, thanks to a visit from a Beijing TV food program, Master Bao quickly became famous.

Master Bao is very popular, but Bao Caisheng is a little "annoyed" because copycat shops are starting to appear all over the place. At the most exaggerated time, there were more than 2,000 copycat "Master Bao" stores across the country, but there were actually only 26 authentic direct stores. Troubled by the real and fake Master Bao, Bao Caisheng embarked on a long road to crack down on counterfeiting. In 2014, the "Master Bao" trademark was successfully registered, and Bao Caisheng officially began to defend his rights. Until 2020, such litigation is still ongoing.

In February 2017, Master Bao opened his first store in People’s Square in Shanghai. It was so popular that there were long queues at the door almost every day. There was even news that “there is a queue at Master Bao’s Pastry Shop in Shanghai People’s Square.” For 7 hours, scalpers resold the numbers at high prices." Scenes like this are happening everywhere. At the end of 2017, after receiving Series A financing from Tiantu Investment, Master Bao, which only had 26 stores, was valued at RMB 1 billion.

Master Bao once sought a new round of financing with a valuation of 10 billion:

The investment community exclusively learned that Master Bao launched a new round of financing in the first half of the year, taking advantage of the popularity of the baking industry. The valuation was once as high as 10 billion yuan. This time, many first-tier VC funds came to us and chatted for a long time.

A consumer investor in Shenzhen who has had contact with Master Bao revealed to the investment community: “I have been looking closely at the baking track since 2020. I first talked about Master Bao at the beginning of this year, but the valuation has risen very high. In the end, I still couldn’t do it.” The other party revealed that there were about five VC institutions contacting Master Bao at the same time, and “the enthusiasm was evident.”

A well-known PE institution in Shanghai also communicated intensively with Master Bao, but in the end they did not invest because they “could not understand the valuation.” The valuation of up to 10 billion yuan may refresh the historical record of the Chinese pastry industry.

The above content refers to The Paper - Master Bao once sought a new round of financing with a valuation of 10 billion