A new consumer survey has quantified what many Hong Kong residents have long suspected: the city’s cherished custom of giving mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival has become a source of excess rather than celebration, with nearly three-quarters of recipients saying they receive more pastries than they actually want.
The Mid-Autumn Festival, falling on September 25 this year, has traditionally been a time when Hong Kong households exchange mooncake boxes as tokens of respect, gratitude and family connection. But a digital survey conducted in September 2026 among approximately 25,000 users of Yindii, a Hong Kong-based surplus food marketplace, found that 72% of respondents receive more mooncakes than they care to eat, signaling a growing disconnect between givers’ intentions and recipients’ desires.
The ‘Mooncake Paradox’ Takes Shape
The survey, described by Yindii as revealing the city’s “Mooncake Paradox,” found the mismatch between generous giving and lukewarm demand runs deep. Only 14% of respondents said a traditional box of mooncakes would be their ideal Mid-Autumn gift. By contrast, 30% said they would prefer a gift or cash voucher, 24% wanted a smaller box or fewer mooncakes, and 20% said they wanted no gift at all.
Mahima Rajangam Natarajan, Yindii co-founder, characterized the problem not as a rejection of tradition but as a clash between social obligation and practical appetite. “Giving more mooncakes doesn’t necessarily make the gesture more meaningful,” Natarajan said. The real issue, she argued, lies in the gap between how many are given, how many people actually want, and what happens to the surplus.
Leftovers Turn Into Landfill
The consequences extend far beyond awkward living-room conversations about unwanted pastries. Nearly 80% of survey respondents reported having uneaten mooncakes left over after previous festivals, and 22% admitted to discarding boxes that were still sealed and safe to eat.
The scale of the waste is staggering. Feeding Hong Kong, an advocacy group, estimates that as many as 2.8 million mooncakes go uneaten in city households every year—a figure that has prompted the charity to launch its annual “Mooncake Madness” collection drive each September, gathering unopened surplus pastries for redistribution to frontline charities.
That seasonal glut compounds a broader environmental crisis. According to data from Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department cited in the Yindii report, the city sent roughly 3,001 tonnes of food waste to landfills daily in 2024, accounting for nearly 30% of Hong Kong’s municipal solid waste.
Why the Giving Continues
If so few people actually want mooncakes, the tradition persists because of what the pastries represent rather than what they taste like. Mooncakes function less as a treat and more as a social obligation—a vehicle for companies to thank employees and clients, for relatives to mark the reunion festival, and for neighbors to maintain goodwill. Because the gesture outweighs the contents, households routinely receive multiple boxes from employers, relatives and friends within the same week, far exceeding what any family can realistically consume before the pastries go stale.
A Market for ‘Rescued’ Mooncakes Emerges
Encouragingly, the survey suggests consumers are open to change. When asked whether they would buy good-quality, safe-to-eat surplus mooncakes from hotels, bakeries or retailers at a discount, 36% said yes outright and another 45% said they might—meaning 81% did not rule it out.
That openness has already created a modest secondary market. Apps like Yindii allow bakeries, hotels and cafés to sell unsold mooncakes and other food as discounted “surprise bags” instead of discarding them. The company reports that its Hong Kong community has rescued more than 500,000 meals in total and helped merchants recover approximately HK$17 million in value from food that would otherwise have gone to waste. Natarajan noted that price, not just environmental appeal, remains the primary motivator for shoppers.
Retailers Adapt With Smaller, Smarter Options
The market is adjusting in other ways as well. This year’s mooncake offerings from Hong Kong hotels and bakeries increasingly feature smaller formats, mini portions and gift sets with reusable packaging—from boxes of four or six mini egg-custard pastries to lantern-shaped tins designed to be kept long after the festival. Novelty collaborations, low-sugar recipes and non-mooncake alternatives such as chocolate, palmiers and tea sets have also multiplied, giving gift-givers ways to mark the occasion without adding to the stockpile of traditional lotus-paste boxes sitting unopened in kitchens across the city.
The Bigger Question
For now, mooncakes remain deeply embedded in how Hong Kong marks the Mid-Autumn Festival, and few expect the custom of giving them to disappear. But the survey results point to a shift in what “generosity” might need to look like going forward: smaller quantities, more flexible gift formats, and outlets for surplus stock before it becomes waste.
As Natarajan framed the challenge for this Mid-Autumn Festival and beyond: finding a way to preserve the spirit of the tradition—reunion, appreciation, generosity—without the mounting pile of boxes nobody asked for.
Figures cited are drawn from a Yindii consumer survey of approximately 25,000 Hong Kong users conducted in September 2026, alongside data from Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department and Feeding Hong Kong.