Bloomberg 长文复盘肯德基蛋挞在中国的成功，无新增经营事实或指引

Gregoire Michaud didn’t fully grasp what he’d created until a pregnant woman fainted outside Bakehouse, his Hong Kong bakery. It was 2018, and the former Four Seasons Hotel pastry chef had a line of hundreds outside the shop, which had just opened a few months earlier. Michaud can still picture the flashing lights of the ambulance and police vehicles that arrived on the narrow Wan Chai street. “I remember being in the kitchen in the back and I looked like this.” He pauses to pull his eyebrows up in shock. “I told my colleague, ‘What have we done? What is this?’”

The cause of the commotion was Michaud’s dainty sourdough-crust egg tart, his spin on the Macanese treat, which had grown so popular that long lines formed outside his bakery every day. Neighbors fed up with blocked sidewalks frequently called the police. The shop next door blared an automated recording on repeat at the crowds: “Please leave.”

Today, Bakehouse is planning a ninth store in Hong Kong and sells roughly 30,000 tarts a day. Lines still form regularly outside, though they tend to be short and move quickly. As for the pregnant woman, she turned out OK. “She’s a regular,” says Michaud. “She keeps coming back today with her kid.”

Bakehouse is just one player in China’s lucrative egg tart market, a booming business with a surprisingly tangled history. Almost 40 years ago, Portugal’s pastel de nata, a custard tart, was adapted for Macau’s Portuguese community. The localized version eventually became a mass-market hit across China, thanks in large part to KFC, which today generates over 3 billion yuan ($448 million) in annual revenue from the sweet treat. Everyone from McDonald’s Corp. to artisanal bakers is now fighting for a piece of the action, making the egg tart a case study in how globalization and localization feed off each other.

A Happy Accident

The Portuguese-style tart wasn’t the first egg tart to take root in southern China. The Cantonese egg tart, or daan tat, emerged in 1920s Guangzhou, adapted from English custard tarts, and quickly became a fixture in Hong Kong. In a culinary tradition dominated by steamed, subtle desserts like sweet soups and rice cakes, it offered a comforting egg profile that felt indulgent without alienating the Chinese palate.

Cantonese egg tarts are a smooth, bright-yellow custard set in a buttery shortcrust shell. So when British pharmacist-turned-baker Andrew Stow improvised a version of pastel de nata at his Macau bakery, Lord Stow’s, in 1989, at first “people didn’t like it,” says his then-wife, Margaret Wong. The blistered, caramelized top looked unfamiliar. “Because [of] the dark spots on the top, they thought it was burnt.”

Despite the initial hesitation, the couple kept selling the flakier, more deeply caramelized riff on the Portuguese tart, and it turned into a hit. After the pair divorced, Wong licensed her version of the recipe to a KFC franchisee in 1999. The humble pastry became so emblematic of Macau that the city last year officially added egg-tart-making to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

KFC’s involvement proved a major turning point. The American chain occupied a singular place in China’s early exposure to Western food. It opened its first mainland restaurant in Beijing in 1987, becoming one of the first Western consumer brands many Chinese people encountered. A meal could cost a week’s wages for an average worker, making KFC a destination for special occasions. Through the 1990s, its restaurants hosted birthday parties and even wedding ceremonies.

In his memoir, Sam Su, the former longtime chief executive officer of Yum China, which operates KFC in the country, recalls realizing that children were key to persuading families to choose the chain over cheaper local restaurants. Under the one-child policy, each child had two parents and four grandparents to dote on them, so the chain introduced play areas, kids’ meals with toys and Chicky, a rooster mascot, and hired staff to sing and dance with children. “We would hold dance-along events in front of the restaurant after children finished school,” Su writes. “Every afternoon and dinner at the front of KFC was always a big happy party,” he added.

With that platform, the egg tart went from a regional southern staple to a national indulgence, becoming so closely associated with KFC that a running joke on Chinese social media casts the chain as an egg tart business held back by its fried chicken.

It was “the first Westernized dessert that was available on a wide basis to so many Chinese people,” says Gary He, a James Beard Award-winning author and expert on fast-food adaptations. The tart was a small, sweet treat — given for good grades, on a special outing or simply because a child asked for KFC — folded into the rituals of a rapidly modernizing China. “You can’t re-create that now,” he adds. “The country doesn’t get to open up again.”

As KFC’s young customers grew up, the chain evolved with them, marketing itself first to teenagers through youth sports and later to young couples as a date spot. “If you asked urban Chinese born in the ’80s and ’90s about their fondest KFC memories, many would say their first date was at KFC,” says Jaime Xiao, a Zhongshan native who recalls regularly visiting the chain with his college girlfriend. “We kept running into other couples from our own university there.”

That all helped make the egg tart a cultural touchstone rather than just another food craze. The cronut drew three-hour queues in 2013, then mostly disappeared; Dubai chocolate detonated across social feeds in 2023 and has already cooled. KFC, by contrast, still sells hundreds of millions of egg tarts each year in China and continually refreshes the menu with flavor variations like durian, salted egg yolk and boba.

More recently, KFC has turned the egg tart into a weapon in China’s cutthroat coffee wars, vying for the office crowd. Its KCoffee outlets, a standalone cafe concept spun out in 2022 that’s already grown to more than 1,800 stores, are going head to head with Luckin Coffee Inc., with “egg tart dirty coffees” infused with custard flavor in edible pastry cups. Coffee-and-tart deals also give KFC a draw during off-peak hours, serving as a quick breakfast alongside congee or soy milk or as part of the white-collar afternoon tea routine in Chinese cities.

Full Circle

Now everyone wants in. In March, McDonald’s began piloting egg tarts across several mainland Chinese cities, surprising customers with a product so closely identified with an archrival. Artisanal bakeries like Bakehouse have multiplied, and the boom has even drawn Portuguese purveyors back into the market their pastry helped create. In June renowned Lisbon bakery Manteigaria opened its first Hong Kong store and plans to open five more in the city — an ambitious addition to its roughly 20 shops across Europe. Another pastel de nata rival, Santa Nata, opened its first Asian location there in July.

Fabio Pombo, general manager of Manteigaria Hong Kong, acknowledges the irony: The Portuguese bakery is entering a market where decades of localization have changed what customers expect an egg tart to taste like. While Manteigaria benefits from the mass appeal KFC has created, “it can be bad for us as well because people expect us to be the KFC thing,” he says. “You will see our comments on Google sometimes: ‘I was expecting more egg flavor.’”

Traditional Portuguese pastéis de nata have a gooier, cream-forward filling and are typically dusted with cinnamon, in contrast to the eggier profile many Chinese customers now expect. Some bakeries in Portugal have introduced novelty flavors like Biscoff, tiramisu and crème brûlée, but Manteigaria is a purist. “That’s like showing an Italian pineapple on pizza,” Pombo says, scrunching his face in horror. The Hong Kong shop has made just one concession to local tastes: It uses half the sugar of the tarts it sells in Portugal.

So far, the adjustment appears to be working. “We’ve been having huge success since Day 1,” Pombo says. The current constraint is production, not demand: The shop hand-presses and fills no more than 5,000 tarts a day, and multiple landlords have already approached him about expanding.

“Many times I go outside and ask customers, ‘Are they as good as KFC ones?’” Pombo says. “And people laugh.”