Pangmei Shitang rebrands Chinese desserts as squidgy collectible toys

Pangmei's noodle house already ranked #1 in its category on Chinese food apps. The new dessert offshoot, Pangmei Shitang, wanted the same cult status, but traditional Chinese desserts had taken a back seat to Western cakes and tarts among young consumers. The brief: bring ancient dessert products to a new generation.

Make the identity taste like the sweets: blow up rounded Heiti glyphs into puffy mochi-textured type, wrapped in gachapon, arcade and 80s–90s night-market nostalgia.

Meat Studio built a wordmark and type system from rounded Heiti, inflating the strokes until positive and negative space vanished so each character reads as one squidgy morsel. They 3D-printed the gelatinous letterforms for in-store signage, borrowed gachapon compartments for layout structures, and filled the palette with vintage Taiwanese and Hong Kong street-stall colour and imagery.

The identity won a 2025 D&AD Yellow Pencil in New Brand Identity – Enterprise and gave a heritage food category a look young consumers could relate to, carried through packaging, menus, signage and store interiors.

Pangmei had built a cult noodle brand in Beijing, consistently ranked #1 in its category on food recommendation apps, with queues outside the shop all day. When it launched Pangmei Shitang (胖妹拾糖), a dessert offshoot, it called in Meat Studio with a familiar problem: traditional Chinese desserts were losing young consumers to cakes and tarts, so the identity had to make ancient recipes feel native to a new generation.

Meat Studio's answer was to make the branding itself taste like the sweets. Rounded Heiti letterforms — the friendly sans used on street-market signage — were inflated until the strokes filled every gap, so each character reads as a single puffy mochi, grass-jelly or boba morsel. Layouts borrowed the compartmented structure of gachapon toy dispensers, while the palette and imagery pulled from Taiwanese and Hong Kong night markets of the late 80s and 90s.

The gelatinous typography was 3D-printed for in-store signage so the texture carried into the physical shop, and the whole system was designed to feel jovial and warm rather than heritage-precious. As Meat Studio founder Ronald Tau put it, every visual cue came from a specific moment in the collective memory of East Asian street-food culture.

The identity won a Yellow Pencil in New Brand Identity – Enterprise at the 2025 D&AD Awards, landing a spot in the annual alongside the year's most admired brand systems.

Inflating Heiti letterforms made the wordmark an appetising object — the brand identity performs the gooey, bouncy texture of the desserts themselves.

Gachapon machines, pachinko arcades and 80s–90s night markets are a shared memory for the target generation, so nostalgia did the emotional work without a heritage lecture.

3D-printing the type for in-store signage carried the digital identity's texture into the physical brand experience.

Because the reference pool was East Asian street food culture rather than generic 'young and fun' design, the result stood apart from Western-style dessert branding.

When a category feels dated, borrow the visual language of what young buyers already love — toys, arcades, night markets — and let the product's texture dictate the design.

Pangmei Shitang rolled the identity across packaging, store interiors and 3D-printed signage, and Meat Studio was recognized with a D&AD 2025 Yellow Pencil, placing the brand system in the D&AD Annual's design canon. The work circulated through design press as an example of translating a heritage food category into contemporary pop culture.