Kitchen AC and Slush Machines Are Still Growing as the Cooling Market Shrinks
At the air conditioning industry forum held in Tianjin at the end of August, Wang Lei, secretary-general of the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, put it plainly: the pressure this year is cumulative. Raw material prices swinging at a high level, rising channel and operating costs, weakening consumer confidence, and intensifying competition in a saturated market — all of it landed in the same window.
The headline numbers are not pretty. AVC's retail tracking shows that in the 2026 cooling year (August 2025 to July 2026), domestic air conditioner retail volume came to 68.97 million units, down 14.4% year on year, while retail value reached RMB 207.8 billion, down 19.2%. Industry data from ChinaIOL paints a similar picture: production of 187 million units and sales of 188 million units, both down 10.9%, split between 98.29 million units shipped domestically (-11.7%) and 89.41 million exported (-10.0%). By the end of June, total industry inventory stood at 69.95 million units, 56.23 million of which sat in the channel, against total capacity of roughly 350 million units — a capacity utilisation rate below 60%.
Read together, those figures support one conclusion: growth built on weather luck and sheer scale has run out of road.
Yet three lines in the same data set are pointing upward.
The first is exports, and the shift is structural. Chinese air conditioner exports faced headwinds overall in the 2026 cooling year, but Europe stood out. Household air conditioning penetration in most EU countries remains below 30%, and that low base collided with repeated heatwaves this summer to release a concentrated wave of demand. What is more interesting is the preference: European buyers lean toward portable and mobile units that are cheap and easy to install, and that sub-segment grew explosively during the cooling year. For manufacturers selling abroad, the lesson is that not every overseas market is working through excess inventory — there is a real gap for products that ship ready to plug in and run.
The second line runs through commercial kitchens back home. While the broader market contracts, demand for kitchen cooling is climbing. Industry research puts China's kitchen cooling equipment market above RMB 8 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 12% a year. The reason is straightforward. A standard air conditioner placed in a kitchen loses its evaporator coil to grease and trips its high-temperature cutout within a year or two. Purpose-built kitchen units address this with anti-grease coatings, motors rated for temperatures above 70°C, and filters designed to be pulled out and washed. In newly built central kitchens and large canteens, more than 60% now prioritise water-cooled fresh air systems, and the retrofit, cleaning and repair market is growing at over 15% annually.
More notable still is the shift toward integrated design. Cooling a kitchen is no longer a matter of dropping in one machine; it now means coordinating air conditioning, exhaust, and fume purification. Supply air paths have to avoid the negative-pressure zone above the range, condensate drainage has to stay clear of food preparation areas, and make-up air volume has to be matched to cooling capacity. Suppliers selling single units are being squeezed out by those who can deliver a system design.
The third line is cold beverage equipment — slush machines and frozen drink dispensers. At the Ningbo Home Appliances Expo, trade media described the first half of the year as a "K-shaped split": high-volume legacy categories dragged the total down while niche segments ran independently upward. Cold beverage equipment is a textbook case. One manufacturer in Yuyao, Zhejiang, which built its business on irons and floor scrubbers, launched a residential slush machine two years ago and watched sales multiply tenfold within a year. This year the company added a commercial version with a carry handle that makes both ice and cocktails, aimed at overseas restaurants, bars, and hotels. Local customs statistics show Yuyao companies exported RMB 82.46 million worth of ice cream and ice makers in the first five months of 2026, up 12.2% year on year.
Longer-range forecasts from QYR point the same direction: the global slush machine market was worth USD 328 million in 2025 and is expected to reach USD 435 million by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 4.8%. North America, Europe, China, and Japan are the four core consumption regions, and twin-barrel machines held roughly 45% of global share in 2024 — two flavours at once is now the default configuration for commercial use. Three forces drive this market: new installations tied to chain restaurant and convenience store expansion; lower operating costs from efficient compressors and low-GWP refrigerants such as R290 and R600a; and the replacement of manual labour through automatic cleaning and independent temperature control per barrel.
Connect the three threads and the logic becomes clear. The contraction comes from subsidy pull-forward, a weak property market, and misplaced weather, and it hits undifferentiated products hardest. Kitchen air conditioners, evaporative coolers, and slush machines answer specific, non-negotiable, situation-bound needs. A kitchen has to be cooled. The cold drink season has to be served. These products do not wait on a replacement cycle, and they are not easily displaced by a cheap wall-mounted unit.
For equipment makers, the question worth asking in the 2026 cooling year is not how large the market still is, but whether the specific problem in the specific setting has actually been solved. Getting grease resistance right, making automatic cleaning genuinely hands-off, and turning easy installation into a delivery advantage will do more for a business than printing one more figure on a spec sheet.