Alimentari

When Shanghai locked down twenty-six million residents for sixty-five days in the spring of 2022, every Alimentari restaurant went dark simultaneously. Ten venues bleeding rent and wages, perishable imports stranded at port, cold-chain costs spiking eighteen thousand renminbi per container, and half the European expatriate customer base preparing to leave China for good. Three years later, the brand operates twelve locations across five cities.

The Import Advantage

The distinction that separates Alimentari from every other foreign restaurant group in China is invisible to diners. Behind each plate of burrata, each wood-fired pizza, each glass of Italian wine lies an import infrastructure that most restaurateurs never thought to build.

Popolo Group (波波洛集团), the parent company behind Alimentari, controls its supply chain from Italian farms through Chinese customs to the restaurant plate. Atlantic Gate handles freight forwarding. Finigate manages customs clearance, warehousing, and nationwide distribution, importing more than eight hundred European food products from over a hundred brands. Enogate covers ninety-plus wine labels. CIS, or Craft Italian Spirits, distributes artisanal liqueurs. Ninety percent of the ingredients on Alimentari’s tables arrive through the company’s own logistics channels, bypassing the middlemen that other restaurants depend upon.

This vertical integration generates advantages at every level. Purchasing directly from European producers eliminates distributor margins, enabling competitive pricing on deli items that would otherwise carry luxury markups. Controlling the cold chain reduces the compliance risk that has crippled less sophisticated importers under China’s stringent food safety regulations — a regime so complex that navigating it for fifteen years constitutes a regulatory moat in itself. And owning warehousing and distribution across fourteen Chinese cities creates an infrastructure that competitors cannot replicate through restaurant operations alone.

The model inverts the conventional restaurant business. Where most food-and-beverage entrepreneurs begin with a kitchen and source ingredients from suppliers, Alimentari’s founder began with a logistics company and built restaurants to showcase what he could import.

From Anfu Lu

The story begins at 158 Anfu Lu (安福路), a narrow shopfront in Shanghai’s French Concession, where an Italian imported food store called Feidan opened around 2005. The concept was straightforward: stock the European groceries that Shanghai’s expatriate community missed from home. Olive oil, cured meats, Italian cheeses, packaged pasta. Ninety percent of the customers were foreign. In 2007, a small group of Italian entrepreneurs formalized the venture as Popolo Group.

For seven years, Feidan remained a niche operation serving a niche audience. Then China’s food safety crisis changed everything.

In 2012 and 2013, a cascade of scandals shattered Chinese consumer confidence in domestic food production. Melamine-tainted milk powder had already killed six infants and sickened three hundred thousand children. Reports of cadmium-contaminated rice, recycled cooking oil extracted from gutters, and counterfeit eggs made from chemicals turned every supermarket visit into a risk calculation. For Chinese parents, the simplest response was the most dramatic: stop trusting domestic food entirely.

Revenue at Feidan jumped thirty percent in a single year. The customer base shifted from ninety percent foreign to roughly fifty percent Chinese. The imported food market in China was already worth eighteen billion dollars and accelerating. What had been an expatriate indulgence became, for a generation of Chinese consumers, a safety decision. And unlike a fashion trend, the shift was structural: parents who switched to imported milk powder after melamine were not switching back. The behavior spread from infant nutrition into dairy, cooking oils, condiments, and prepared foods. By 2013, international media were documenting the boom — NPR’s Marketplace reported from the Anfu Lu shop itself, capturing the moment a niche expat grocer became a proxy for an eighteen-billion-dollar structural shift.

The commercial opportunity was enormous, but it carried a prerequisite that most aspiring importers lacked: the ability to navigate China’s food import regulations. The GACC facility registration process, CFDA compliance requirements, cold-chain certification protocols, Chinese-language labeling mandates, and periodic regulatory audits constituted a barrier that eliminated casual competitors. Finigate’s years of accumulated clearance expertise — built through the unglamorous work of moving containers through customs — gave Popolo Group a regulatory moat that could not be purchased or quickly built.

In 2014, the group opened Gemma, a Neapolitan pizzeria on Donghu Lu (东湖路) — its first proper sit-down restaurant, with a wood-fired oven and ingredients sourced directly through Finigate. Bar Centrale and Piccolo followed in 2016, expanding the format range from pizzeria to neighborhood bar to corner deli.

Seven Concepts, One Supply Chain

The Alimentari brand launched in 2017 when Feidan was renamed — a deliberate choice of identity. In Italian, alimentari are the neighborhood food stores found in every village: the corner shops where families buy fresh bread, cured meats, cheese, and daily essentials. The name signals everyday Italian food culture, not luxury dining.

Each subsequent concept targets a distinct dining occasion while drawing from the same import infrastructure. Alimentari Grande, the flagship restaurant-supermarket, lets diners purchase the same imported products they ate at their table. Alimentari Grill at Shangkang Li focuses on charcoal-grilled meats alongside La Vermuteria, a dedicated vermouth bar serving house-brand Mercante. Alimentari Mulino, the bakery-restaurant, centers on fresh bread and pastries. Degusteria on Jiaozhou Lu combines lunch with imported food retail. Piccolo on Panyu Lu is a neighborhood deli. Emporio in Pudong brings the concept east of the Huangpu River.

The portfolio extends past restaurants entirely: Buco serves house-made gelato, Mercante is a house vermouth label, Cookie Crew produces artisanal cookies, and Valazza Coffee bears the founder’s surname.

The multiplication logic is deliberate: each concept occupies its own position, but Finigate feeds them all. The supply chain investment amortizes across twelve locations instead of one. And the price range — averaging 115 to 250 renminbi per person — positions the brand above budget casual dining but well below the Michelin-tier Italian restaurants that serve Shanghai’s luxury market. Alimentari occupies accessible premium territory: La Marzocco espresso machines costing over 150,000 renminbi each, imported burrata flown from Italy, house-brewed lager produced in Nanjing — quality markers that justify the price without making diners feel they are paying for theatre.

Sixty-Five Days

By early 2022, Popolo Group operated roughly eleven venues across Shanghai and Hangzhou, with Finigate distributing to institutional clients across China. Then, on March twenty-seventh, Shanghai imposed the most extreme pandemic measure any major city had enacted.

The lockdown confined twenty-six million residents to their apartment compounds for sixty-five days. Drone-mounted loudspeakers circled residential blocks. The US Consulate ordered non-emergency staff evacuation. All restaurant dine-in service ceased immediately and would not resume until approximately June twenty-ninth — more than three months of zero dine-in revenue.

Three simultaneous pressures converged. Every restaurant generated nothing while rent, wages for two to five hundred employees, and perishable inventory costs continued accruing. China’s cold-chain import regulations became punitive: mandatory COVID-19 testing and disinfection of imported chilled and frozen food added approximately eighteen thousand renminbi per container, while port clearance times ballooned from ten days to over a month. And the customer base was eroding in real time — approximately half of Shanghai’s European expatriate community would leave China permanently during the pandemic period, reducing the foreign worker population from eighty thousand to fifty thousand.

The casualties mounted. One-third of Shanghai’s restaurants disappeared between 2016 and 2022. Element Fresh, a twenty-year American casual dining institution, closed permanently. Sherpa’s, the pioneering delivery service that had served Shanghai for twenty-three years, shut down. The Australian Camel Group folded. Nearly three million restaurants and cafes would close nationally by 2024.

What carried Alimentari through was the infrastructure behind the restaurants. Finigate’s institutional import clients — other restaurants, retailers, hotels — continued purchasing even when Popolo Group’s own venues were dark. The distribution network that served fourteen cities could pivot to Shanghai’s lockdown-era community group-buying (团购), where residents organized collective purchases through WeChat. And when the lockdown lifted, the same logistics infrastructure that sustained the company through zero-revenue months enabled immediate restocking while competitors scrambled to rebuild supplier relationships from scratch.

Five Cities

The post-lockdown trajectory reveals the strategic logic. Where competitors retrenched, Alimentari accelerated. In January 2023, Emporio opened in Pudong, the group’s first location east of the Huangpu. In July, Alimentari Grande opened at Taikoo Li in Chengdu (成都), with ninety percent of ingredients still imported directly from Italy — a logistical assertion that the supply chain could stretch fifteen hundred kilometers inland.

The expansion intensified in 2024. Alimentari Grande Beijing opened at Sanlitun T+ Mall in March — the group’s entry into China’s capital, thirty-five hundred kilometers from its Shanghai base. Mulino Shenzhen (深圳) followed at COCOPark in Futian, marking the brand’s first presence in South China.

Then came consolidation. By 2025, Alimentari had closed both Chengdu locations along with several Shanghai concepts — Circo, Piazza, and Favola — that had not found sustainable footing. The portfolio sharpened around its proven formats. Two new openings replaced the closures in stronger positions: Alimentari Mulino at MixC Mall in Hangzhou and Alimentari Grande in Nanjing (南京). The result was a leaner network of twelve locations across five cities, concentrated where the supply chain economics worked best.

The recognition followed the scale. Alimentari Grande Shanghai earned consecutive placements on Dianping’s Must-Eat List (大众点评必吃榜) in 2022 and 2023, the closest Chinese equivalent to a Michelin consumer recommendation. TripAdvisor awarded its Travelers’ Choice designation. Shanghai’s municipal government featured Alimentari as a recommended dining destination, describing it as “a pioneer in introducing Italian brunch to the city.” Chinese social media crowned it 上海brunch天花板 — Shanghai’s brunch ceiling, meaning the best.

The Pipeline

The question facing Alimentari is whether the model that dominated Shanghai can sustain itself at national scale. Each new city tests the logistics infrastructure that proved decisive during COVID. Beijing and Shenzhen are further from Shanghai’s port than Hangzhou — the cold chain grows longer and the freshness calculus more demanding. The Chengdu withdrawal demonstrated that distance alone can defeat even a vertically integrated supply chain. China’s restaurant market remains brutally competitive: even as Alimentari refines its footprint, the industry continues to shed competitors at rates that would concern any investor.

But the vertical integration moat deepens with each additional location. More venues generate more volume through Finigate. More volume improves purchasing power with European suppliers. Better unit economics create runway for further expansion. Every competitor that exits the market — and the exit rate is relentless — leaves behind customer demand that Alimentari’s infrastructure is positioned to absorb.

The flywheel that began in a cramped Anfu Lu shop twenty years ago now operates across a geography spanning from Beijing to Shenzhen. The company employs between two and five hundred people, distributes through five e-commerce platforms including Taobao, Tmall, and Xiaohongshu, and its import arm supplies institutional clients in cities where no Alimentari restaurant yet exists. The supply chain underneath it all belongs to no one else.

Last updated: March 15, 2026