Today, we discuss assortment strategy not because consumption is moving in a single direction, but because multiple consumption logics now coexist. In this environment, the core challenge for retail is no longer identifying trends, but building a coherent decision-making framework that remains intact amid layered and parallel realities.

In the past, information asymmetry and limited choice meant that channels themselves represented value, and consumers cared primarily about where to buy. Today, however, quality products are abundant, homogenization happens at speed, prices are highly transparent, and comparisons are effortless. Choice, rather than empowerment, has become a burden. What consumers truly lack is no longer products or information, but something more fundamental: whom they can trust.

In today’s consumption landscape, retail channels must be built and managed much like brands. They are no longer merely venues for transactions, but entities that establish trust in consumers’ minds through consistent assortment judgment, a coherent value orientation, and experiences that can be repeatedly validated. It is this sustained clarity that enables retailers to form a credible and resilient brand presence.

FamilyMart has been operating in mainland China for 20 years, with nearly 3,000 stores, more than 85% of which are franchised. If viewed through the traditional lens of a “curator-style” merchandiser, FamilyMart may not appear particularly “trendy”: it does not aggressively chase frontier hit products, nor does it emphasize a strong personal aesthetic. Yet this perception misses the point. FamilyMart’s strength in assortment lies not in creating single blockbuster items, but in stability, structure, and the ability to make high-frequency decisions day after day.

Operating under the realities of high-frequency consumption, low average transaction value, and strong franchise constraints, FamilyMart is not simply selecting products. Through assortment, it builds a daily life system that consumers can trust and rely on—from breakfast to late-night meals, from efficiency to emotional comfort.

Starting from the concept of “a day in life,” this session explores how FamilyMart uses time-slot segmentation, scenario-based assortment, and membership data to reverse-engineer its product structure, continuously optimizing the consumer experience at scale. It ultimately addresses a core question: when 85% of stores are franchised, for whom—and for which moment, and which life state—should the merchandiser truly be making decisions?

Central Retail is Thailand’s second-largest retail group, second only to CP ALL, with operations spanning multiple markets across Asia and Europe. In 2023, Central Retail reported global revenue of THB 253.015 billion, sustaining steady growth. In its domestic market, Central Retail’s supermarket portfolio under the Tops brand has developed a multi-tiered retail ecosystem ranging from community-based formats to high-end specialty stores, including Tops Daily, Tops Market, Tops Food Hall, and Tops Fine Food, designed to serve consumers across different income levels and lifestyle needs.

Within such a highly diversified retail system—where formats are layered and consumer segments are clearly differentiated—the challenge of assortment planning goes far beyond selecting the right products for individual stores. Instead, it becomes a question of how to build an assortment system that delivers clear differentiation across price tiers, purchase frequencies, and aesthetic expectations, while maintaining internal coherence and consistency at the group level.

When the same retail group must simultaneously support highly routine, community-based consumption and cater to premium consumers who are acutely sensitive to quality, flavor, and aesthetics, how should assortment standards be defined? Which decisions should vary by format, and which principles must remain unified across the organization? In a multi-format retail group, is the role of the assortment leader primarily to allocate products—or to design the underlying decision framework?

Drawing on Central Retail’s practical experience in operating multiple formats in parallel, this session explores how assortment systems can avoid fragmentation within complex retail structures. It further examines how the role, capabilities, and decision boundaries of assortment leaders evolve in multi-tier retail ecosystems, and what insights this experience may offer to other markets and retail models.

In an era of information overload, any food safety incident can be instantly amplified. The rate at which trust is eroded far outpaces a company’s ability to restore it.

Therefore, a robust, stable, and flexibly responsive production and supply system has become the most critical foundational capability for retailers and brands.

In the Chinese market, high-quality retail has long relied on a relatively stable premise: premium products carried inherent consensus, discerning consumers would naturally gravitate toward them, and buyers’ judgments were automatically recognized as valuable. However, this premise is shifting. Post-pandemic, core customer segments have fragmented and some have been lost, while consumption patterns and lifestyles have changed significantly. At the same time, limited online channel capabilities have further widened the communication gap between high-quality retail and the new generation of consumers.

Against this backdrop, buyer-led retail—centered on judgment and professional expertise—is now facing more complex challenges in scaling operations, including cash efficiency, organizational governance, and supplier collaboration models. For city’super, the question is no longer simply how to continuously select “great products,” but how to rebuild retail relationships that are understood, chosen, and trusted over the long term, in an environment of shifting customer segments and operational constraints. This evolution requires the buyer system to upgrade from a single product-selection mechanism to a structured, organization-supported, system-managed, and supplier-collaborative model.

This session will share city’super’s recent adjustments in the Chinese market and discuss the core challenges facing buyer-led retail today, including restructuring organizational systems, balancing buyer judgment with cash management, transforming supplier relationships from transactional to collaborative, and reestablishing effective communication with target consumer segments in the new consumption landscape.

Within a highly scaled platform like JD, data, efficiency, and supply chain capabilities form the core strengths of developing own-brand products. However, in food—a category highly dependent on intuitive judgment and long-term accumulation—does systematization and scale introduce new constraints? This session will draw from JD’s own-brand experience to discuss which capabilities become harder to maintain as the platform scales, and how these challenges influence long-term decisions in food selection and innovation.

Key discussion points:

• Amid massive amounts of data, which signals are actually unreliable? Among metrics like search, clicks, conversion, and repurchase, which are short-term noise and not suitable to directly guide new products?
• When data consistently points toward “faster, cheaper, more homogenous,” how does the platform preserve long-term product direction?
• In “slow-variable” categories like food, should data lead or lag decision-making? Which food trends inherently show delayed signals? How does JD capture shifts in sentiment, health, and culture ahead of the data curve? Is data more suited for discovery or validation in food selection?
• As platform scale increases, which capabilities paradoxically become more difficult? Food innovation often requires small-batch, multi-round experimentation with unstable outcomes, whereas JD’s system is designed for predictable quality and large-scale replication. Where does JD insist on maintaining scale, and where does it intentionally sacrifice scale to preserve diversity?

The fresh food e-commerce sector is fiercely competitive, and Dingdong Fresh’s track record speaks for itself. In the high-stakes, fast-changing dark store landscape, Dingdong Fresh has survived not through aggressive expansion, but by gradually transforming product operations into a measurable, verifiable digital system. Today, Dingdong operates over 1,000 dark stores nationwide, with each store managing an average of around 4,000 SKUs. Every 24 hours, the system forecasts demand for all SKUs across all locations, directly driving procurement, production, and allocation decisions. By the end of 2023, roughly 90% of dark store procurement is automatically completed by the system. Even under complex conditions such as extreme weather, forecast accuracy remains above 85%, while overall loss rates are consistently controlled between 1%–2%. At this scale and complexity, product selection is no longer a matter of experiential judgment—it has become an engineering problem that requires continuous calculation and calibration by the system.

This session will focus on three core questions:

How digital systems reshape product selection granularity and rhythm — From launch and testing to delisting, how selection is converted into a fast-fail, continuously iterated mechanism.

SKU management as a structural, not just numerical issue — How the system dynamically calibrates SKU structures across cities and stores to balance volume, average order value, repurchase, and gross margin.

How digitalization truly supports private-label and differentiated product development — Which data points define “worthy-to-develop” products, and how innovation failure costs and risks are controlled.

Chris is one of the few leaders who has completed the full journey from frontline buyer to group CEO. Before stepping into the CEO role, he spent years at the very front line of merchandise decisions, personally making countless judgments on whether a product should be listed. As his role shifted toward group management and corporate leadership, the challenge he faced was no longer the success of a single product, but how to enable the organization to continue making sound product decisions over the long term.

In this session, Chris will draw on his experience transitioning from an individual decision-maker to an organizational leader, sharing how he transformed experience- and intuition-driven personal judgment into organizational capabilities that can be replicated and continuously calibrated. He will also explore how retail companies should make trade-offs between speed, scale, and long-term value while pursuing differentiation and breakout products.

This is not a methodology-focused talk on “how to create bestsellers,” but a discussion on how judgment can be embedded into systems—and amplified sustainably within an organization.

At the recently announced 2026 Superior Taste Award, eight core products from Maizhenxuan stood out. Two received the highest distinction of Three Stars for Exceptional Taste, while several others were awarded Two Stars for Remarkable Taste and One Star for Notable Quality.

What impressed us about Alex is his consistent belief that products are something worth taking seriously. In his work, products are not vehicles for KPIs, but a series of questions that must be asked again and again: What does “truly delicious” mean? What kind of health actually matters? Which flavors are worth standing by, and which choices—though seemingly correct—lack a soul and should be rejected? These judgments do not stop at philosophy; they are embedded in everyday practices of assortment decisions, product choices, and organizational collaboration.

What Alex represents is not a formula for quickly replicating bestsellers, but a product value system that is becoming increasingly rare in the industry—one that builds standards of judgment from personal taste, drives organizational decisions from real experience, and preserves the dignity of the product itself even under pressure from cost and efficiency. This devotion to product is not loud, but it is enduring and consistent.

When product judgment is already in place, who carries it through the final mile to being truly seen?

Strawberry box cakes, HPP red apple juice, and lime juice—though seemingly from different categories—share a highly similar journey: from hyped blockbusters to consistently chosen long-term bestsellers.

By dissecting these products, we find that those capable of outlasting the hype cycle rarely rely on continuous buzz. Instead, they achieve the shift from “being noticed” to “being needed” through solid taste, frequent use, appropriate price positioning, and consistent user experience.

This discussion seeks to answer a question more crucial for all brand and product leaders:

 After the hype fades, which products are truly worth sustaining for the long term?

Based on long-term sales data analysis of nearly 600,000 SKUs and a study of product structures that continue to be chosen even after their initial hype, we are attempting something rarely done in the industry—not to predict trends, but to provide informed judgment.

In this session, we will unveil several “Potential Product Concept Works” for 2026–2027. These are not ready-to-market products, but systematic projections of future product forms, usage scenarios, and consumer motivations based on common traits shared by long-lasting bestsellers.

These concept works illustrate the directions most likely to endure the hype cycle if product development starts seriously today.