With tens of billions scale, frozen bakery in China grows at 15%~20% per year. It has inherent advantages in stable supply, long shelf life, and scaled manufacturing. However, it takes a bit more improvement in flavor innovation, taste preservation, and variety expansion in comparison with fresh bakery.
There are numerous regional flavors in China and each flavor has endless variations. Spiceness alone has shown dazzling versatility, less saltiness, sweetness, sourness...When regional flavored dishes, like Fish and Pickled Cabbage, Pig Intestines with Chicken, approach the peak, it is time to go off the mainstream and seek something new.
The era of consumers seeking goods out is gone. It is time to find the right consumers and sell well for products. Products shall be precisely aligned with consumer segmentation from the ideation phase. The new generation of consumers want both great flavors and clean ingredients. Why not target your consumers, work on the ingredients, and develop in high accuracy?
New food and beverage products containing prebiotics, something we see often but know little about, register 11.11% CAGR over the past five years. What is it exactly? What are the benefits? How to drive product innovation with prebiotics?
Statistics show that Covid-19 has led to a surge in patients with depressive order and anxiety disorder. Ingredients that are good for stress management and sleep quality, like GABA and L-Theanine, come under the spotlight. Any other trending ingredients like this? How to educate consumers properly and avoid being seen fooling gimmicks? How to develop products by tapping into food as one of the mood-affecting factors?
Behind the trend of functional foods is relentless effort in discovering raw materials. Healthiness and safety of ingredients become key factors in decision-making as consumers are savvier. What are the benefits of insoluble dietary fiber? What surprises resistant starch has to show us when used in food?
When traffic dividend goes away and louder hawking does not bring more attention, product content and interest content come bottlenecks. Take TikTok for example, content operation costs boosts, and content starts to suffer homogeneity despite a large amount of users. How to break content bottlenecks? How to manage content segmentations? How to reflect true brand value through content?
Compared with public Internet domains, private traffic is better poised for social fission, repurchases, fine-grained user management and resource protection. Private traffic makes the pond bigger and closes the loop in the ecosystem, with conversion cost higher and higher. Perhaps it is possible to have it all!
This generation of consumers care more about aesthetic value than 5 to 10 years ago.
Abuse of trending elements? Too forthcoming? No！
It is time for brands to see aesthetics as a long-term trend rather than a short-term dividend.
On its way to chef-free, standardization, and branding, the food and drink industry set the bar higher for all suppliers, demanding unique taste memory points and technical unique selling points be created for each brand. But cost is shockingly high! There must be a way to reconcile between cost efficiency and flavor customization.
With all the hustle and bustle in food and drink establishments, large demands from downstream brands must be efficiently passed along the supply chain. Looking back, mid-stream companies are digitalizing demand planning, order management, distribution, warehousing, and logistics. Full-chain transparency will make supply-demand coordination easier.
Some consumers claim eating fresh but are honest with their actions, starting to pay for near-expired foods from discount stores that feature good product selections and yet low prices. On the other side, capital flows in, and brands seize the momentum by developing non-near-expired collaboration products and accelerating distribution in channels. However, it is important to figure out the logic behind the discount business in the first step.
In addition to guavas, prickly pears, and sea-buckthorn berries, products with pomelo as a trending ingredient are gaining popularity in Japan, Europe, and America. However, it is still a blue ocean in China. Perhaps playing it reversely is a good idea—building upstream first and then brand, rather than gaining a quick access to market via contract manufacturing. How to tackle challenges with long-termism? How to build an industry based on deep processing?
Upstream suppliers possess materials, technology, and even capital? Suppliers have now put on a different hat, investing in all links of the chain – new consumer brands, raw material suppliers, and processors. What are their tactics in the game? What changes will be brought to the industrial chain and invested companies apart from capital injection?