Chinese company eyes overseas partners to boost local snacks market

BESTORE (Liangpinpuzi), China’s leading leisure snack brand, is undertaking efforts to bring in global high-quality snack manufacturers and suppliers to the Chinese snack market.

Bestore rose to the top of China’s snack manufacturing industry after nine years of development, with its success reflected in a new giant display in New York's Times Square in time for the Spring Festival. According to the company, it has twice the market share of its closest competitor, with sales of imported food hitting nearly RMB 400 million in 2015. Its all-channel sales network of 37 online channels and 1,700 chain stores sells more than 1,500 kinds of snacks.

Bestore’s sales channel offers 11 food categories covering nuts, roasted seeds, healthy drinks, preserved plums, preserved fruits, meat snacks, seafood snacks, vegetarian snacks, biscuits and cakes, candies and puddings, and beverages. The company has raw materials and snack processing plants locally and in different parts of the world such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Africa, South America, North America, and Southeast Asia. Key categories include pecans and pistachios from the US, and dried mangoes from the Philippines.

China’s snack market, valued at RMB 1.3 trillion and rising by 20% each year, started seeing cross-border business in 2015. Globalization is increasingly seen as one of the key directions for the industry in the years to come. The rising adoption of e-commerce, for one, has resulted in an eight-fold growth in food categories sales in three years only for Tmall, China's largest e-commerce platform. The increase in e-commerce sales of food categories exceeded the average growth of Tmall’s business.

The emergence of cross-border e-commerce and chain stores as represented by Bestore is changing the domestic sales channel for imported products. Many foreign suppliers were unaware of specialized snack formats such as Bestore’s, which covers a variety of sales channels, and thought that the supermarket is the only Chinese snacks channel. The new channel then provides a clear step away from the traditional commodity circulation system wherein foreign products are able to enter China first by finding a general agent in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangdong, then getting sub-agents in provinces, and then regional agents to be able to push goods into shopping malls and other traditional channels.

Bestore believes a win-win cooperation can be achieved by using consolidated channels and operational capabilities in the domestic market and purchasing products directly from abroad to reduce intermediate links.