Mid Autumn Fest meat demand has suppliers raising white flags
With the long weekend just around the corner, the market for barbecue supplies is booming! Wholesale barbecue suppliers are completely swamped. To handle the surge in orders, one business owner is turning to friends and family for help. They begin working in the early mornings until 3 or 4am and see daily revenue exceed NT$1 million. Popular items such as meat skewers or handmade meat rolls are in high demand. Even a daily output of 5,000 skewers is failing to meet demand. Despite preparing an inventory worth over NT$10 million, the rapid surge in demand is forcing suppliers to decline new orders.
Here are freshly grilled skewers with their tempting marbling and mouth-watering aroma. For just one bite, the barbecue factory is swamped with work.
Inside the cardboard boxes, the meat is sorted by type and loaded into crates in batches before being moved to the freezer. Every day the barbecue ingredients are shipped directly from the factory to wholesalers.
- Orders surged unexpectedly on the 21st, so we stopped accepting new ones. Still, there are over 100 pending orders.
Aside from the pre-orders, they have many walk-in customers who bring their freezers to stock up.
Customer
Loyal to this supplier
I’ve been coming here to buy for the Mid-Autumn Festival for years; everything is already skewered, so there’s no cleanup involved.
Tang Shih-ching
FTV reporter
What’s the best way to enjoy barbecue? In my hand, I have 20-inch barbecue meat skewers - they go through hundreds of packs daily in sales. Even inside this massive walk-in freezer, where stock is constantly being replenished, demand cannot be met.
Since August, sales have surpassed NT$10 million. However, the pace of incoming orders is much faster than the supplier’s ability to meet them, leaving them no choice but to surrender and press pause on new orders.
Yang Chien-huang
Barbecue meat supplier
Starting this week, we asked friends and family to come and help. We’ve been busy since 10am and work until 3 or 4am, since yesterday we have reached our limit. We generated over NT$1 million in sales in a single day, and much of our stock was completely wiped out.
Long-term partners and live streaming channels place orders ranging from tens of thousands to over a million. Although they secured their stock a month in advance, the unpredictable surge of large orders from individual customers is very intense.
Yang Chien-huang
Barbecue meat supplier
Every day, we prepare 5,000 meat skewers; we deliver more than 10,000 in a day. This is all handmade; there is no way to meet Mid Autumn Festival demands.
To keep costs down, suppliers stocked up on materials in advance and absorbed a portion of the price hike themselves. With production capacity hitting the 10-million-unit limit, the entire workforce is pulling all-nighters to meet the sales peak during this important season.
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#midautumnfestival #barbecue #meatskewers #bbq #meatmadness
2026-09-22
