Hema Saw Cats Hugging Winter Melons Online — Now It's Selling 'Cat Cooling Melons'

Summer in China is brutal, and cats — covered in fur, dramatically opposed to air conditioning bills — are struggling. Recently, pet owners on Xiaohongshu stumbled onto a low-tech solution: winter melon.

Winter melon (donggua) turns out to be a near-perfect feline cooling device. It's 96.9% water, thick-skinned enough to hold its shape, and naturally cool to the touch without being icy. People started hauling these things into their apartments and dropping them into cat beds. Cats, inexplicably, loved it — curling up against them like organic, edible body pillows.

This is the kind of internet behavior that most brands would retweet and move on from. Hema (formerly Hema Fresh, Alibaba's tech-forward grocery chain) took a different route: it turned the meme into an actual SKU.

Within days, Hema launched a custom "pet cooling mini winter melon" — a purpose-sized melon marketed explicitly to the
mī men
("meow crowd," aka cats). The pitch: your cat hugs it to beat the heat, and when everyone's sufficiently cooled down, you chop it up and make soup. One melon, two jobs.

The product blew up. Social media filled with side-by-side photos of cats, dogs, and winter melons — several of which triggered a running gag where commenters had to squint to figure out which was the pet and which was the produce. When buyers started pointing out that the product page photos made the melons look deceptively large relative to the model cats, Hema's team updated the listing images within hours to fix the scale. That correction itself went viral, because nothing says "we're paying attention" like admitting your cat-to-melon ratio was aspirational.

There's a smarter play here than just memejacking. Hema spotted a genuine, organic use case for a commodity ingredient — one that created a new sales occasion without requiring new supply chains or product development. A winter melon is still a winter melon. But by packaging and positioning it around a specific, emotionally resonant behavior (keeping your cat comfortable in a heatwave), the brand turned a bulk produce item into a lifestyle purchase. It's pet economy adjacency without the pet-markup guilt.

It also fits Hema's broader pattern of being terminally online in a way that actually converts. The brand has previously slapped English translations on spinach after a celebrity moment, turned QQ Farm into real-life urban farming, and now, apparently, cornered the cat-thermal-regulation market. Each time, the speed is what sells it — idea to shelf before the discourse cools. When a product page correction becomes a second wave of earned media, you've hit the kind of cultural reflexes most marketing teams pitch in decks but never actually pull off.