Wildman Tribe Co-Founder Zhang Wei: When it comes to barbecuing, the most important thing is to build a model.

Ask AI · How can a nomad tribe build an ultimate experience through a model?

On March 24, the 2026 China Catering Industry Festival and the 35th HCC Global Catering Industry Expo, jointly hosted by the World Chinese Cuisine Industry Federation and Hongcan.com, officially kicked off at the Hangzhou Convention and Exhibition Center. Among them, at the “2026 China Barbecue Development Forum,” Zhang Wei, co-founder of the Nomad Tribe brand, shared some explorations and thoughts on the journey of starting a barbecue business.

△ Zhang Wei, co-founder of the Nomad Tribe brand

He introduced that when the Nomad Chuanba reached its 15th year, the brand encountered some bottlenecks. From renovation to category design, it felt like it was starting to fall behind.

How do you move upward? The Nomad Tribe’s approach is to elevate the products again. From the products to the packaging, and then down to R&D, everything must head toward “beautiful skewers.” In terms of product positioning, it needs to have a flavor of everyday life. For brand renovation, it should be more fashionable and full of meaning, connect with young people, and this led to the Nomad Tribe’s first American retro-style outlet.

Going forward, how does the Nomad Tribe create itself? Previously, the Nomad Chuanba only met customers’ needs for good food and good drinks, but it couldn’t solve the problems afterward. So the Nomad Tribe carried out a re-positioning: eat, drink, play, and have fun—creating a truly experience-based barbecue.

For example, use dance to convey a sense of ceremony. The Nomad Tribe arranged a dance. After that, employees in costumes featuring Nomad culture will dance to pray for blessings. After the dance, they will also give customers a stone called “Luck Comes With Stones,” which has a good寓意, and tell customers which direction to place it when they take it home. Many out-of-town customers, after coming to Shenyang, think of joining Nomad Tribe to watch the performances, feeling that it has a strong sense of ceremony.

On the side of internal management, at Nomad Tribe outlets there is an on-site supervisor who scores the service staff, and the staff’s passion and state every day fall within the evaluation scope, and employees also need to deliver emotional value. Other colleagues who went there said, “Your service staff feel especially passionate.”

On the product side, Nomad Tribe rolled out many free snacks, including soy sauce baked eggs, baked sweet potatoes with cheese, and so on. Because they are free, basically customers will go and eat them, feeling like they’re getting a bargain. The store’s positioning is straightforward: the products are very delicious.

Including putting effort into packaging. It’s hard for a barbecue shop’s skewers to break out of the niche, because generally people use bamboo skewers, and 80% of the flavor is cumin. Nomad Tribe chose many good-looking tableware. Last year, the four stores spent about 600,000 yuan just on supplementary tableware.

Nomad Tribe is the largest barbecue restaurant in the Guinness World Records. A 12,000-square-meter Nomad Tribe outlet will be divided into two areas, front and back. The front building is a business-style KTV, mainly selling face and value for money. It actually captures part of the KTV customer base, because when people come to Nomad Tribe they can both eat and sing. For a group of 20 people, consumption of about 3,000 yuan is basically enough. The back building is for walk-in customers and includes activities such as prayer and blessings, making it both fun and with good food.

Zhang Wei emphasized that the most important thing in barbecue right now is making the model. As long as the product isn’t hard to eat, build good online rankings and online operations, and add great value, the model will definitely be OK. Creating a store, and the new business-format model, is very key.

“We want to get the categories right. Every place needs to reach the absolute best. What barbecue is doing right now is extreme and meticulous refinement. Many details really need to be dug down a full kilometer to show value,” Zhang Wei said.

Author: Hongcan Editorial Office