Dingdong is a fresh grocery e-commerce company in China. Customers order fresh produce, meat, seafood, eggs, and prepared food through the Dingdong Fresh app, and Dingdong delivers within roughly 30 minutes. The business targets urban households, particularly younger consumers and families. Dingdong sells directly to consumers — no third-party marketplace layer. The operational backbone is a distributed network of over 1,100 small frontline fulfillment stations across 28 cities, each positioned to serve households within a 1–3 km radius. Dingdong sources directly from farms and cooperatives, processes products through regional centers, and routes orders to the nearest local station via automated algorithms. Technology — demand forecasting, warehouse management, and routing — is fully self-developed. Dingdong makes money by selling groceries at retail prices and keeping the spread over procurement and fulfillment costs. Profitability is driven by product mix, direct sourcing efficiency, spoilage management, and order density at each station. A growing share of revenue comes from private label products, which contributed roughly 20% of total GMV in 2025 and carry higher margins than branded goods. Dingdong operates 12 production plants to manufacture many of these in-house. The company shifted its focus from growth-at-all-costs to profitability in late 2021, and has maintained non-GAAP profitability for 13 consecutive quarters, though net margins remain thin. Dingdong's growth strategy centers on scaling blockbuster private label products, expanding into smaller cities in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region, and early-stage international expansion through partnerships with overseas grocery retailers.