When "deterministic growth" becomes a channel's essential need, how does Liuliu Plum use new products to reshape market confidence?

As the world’s largest professional food and alcohol exhibition, the 2026 Chengdu Sugar & Liquor Fair just concluded, attracting over 6,600 participating companies from more than 40 countries and regions worldwide.

Industry insiders say: This year’s Sugar & Liquor Fair was different from previous years’ “hype over trending products.” Whether consumers, brand owners, channel vendors, or distributors, everyone has become very cautious.

Data from iiMedia Research shows that by 2025, China’s snack food industry reached a scale of 1.18 trillion yuan, with projections to surpass 1.238 trillion yuan by 2027. However, beneath the prosperity of this trillion-yuan market, the entire snack industry is undergoing profound transformation.

Sugar & Liquor Fair Observation: When “Product Selection” Becomes “Fate Selection”

Walking into this year’s Sugar & Liquor Fair, a clear impression is: “Health” is no longer just a niche option but has become a threshold standard. According to iiMedia Research’s “2026 China Dried Fruit and Preserved Fruit Industry Innovation and Consumer Behavior Insights Report,” 82.0% of consumers prioritize health attributes when choosing new products, and 80.6% pay close attention to ingredient lists. “Clean labels” have become an important direction for brand innovation.

Another noteworthy point is that the market for functional foods is expanding rapidly at a compound annual growth rate of 13.52%. Correspondingly, various manufacturers are continuously extending their products into more segmented scenarios. As consumers enter an era of consumption sovereignty, retail faces higher demands: not just selling products, but meeting needs.

Additionally, brands are directly facing personalized demands and homogeneous competition, which also pushes them to evolve from “product suppliers” to “ecosystem builders.” Currently, the snack food industry shows a trend of “volume and price increase” coexisting with structural differentiation: on one hand, category innovation driven by health (low sugar, high protein, clean labels); on the other, channel boundaries continue to blur, online and offline accelerate integration, and emerging channels like bulk snack stores, instant retail, and membership stores are rapidly rising.

This requires brands to have full-channel penetration capabilities, but in reality, most brands are still struggling between “broad coverage” and “deep operation.”

Perhaps the biggest change is among distributors. This year, distributors are especially cautious—they are no longer seeking “flash-in-the-pan” trending products but are repeatedly asking the same question: “Can this product bring me guaranteed growth?”

This confusion is not unfounded. Data from immediate offline retail monitoring shows that most fast-moving consumer goods experienced price declines in 2025. While snack prices remain relatively stable, channel competition is intensifying. The rise of bulk snack stores is reshaping industry dynamics.

Beneath the surface of the trillion-yuan market’s prosperity, issues like channel inventory backlog, chaotic product selection logic, and fragmented consumption scenarios are becoming a sword hanging over distributors’ heads. They are no longer facing the simple question of “what to sell,” but rather a systemic challenge of “how to sell.”

Liu Liu Mei’s New Approach

Facing collective industry anxiety, during the 2026 Spring Festival, Liu Liu Mei’s TOP 300 distributors achieved triple-digit growth. What did Liu Liu Mei do right? The answer lies in a series of new products showcased at this year’s Sugar & Liquor Fair.

At this fair, Liu Liu Mei unveiled five major sub-brand new products, not only spanning from green plums to dried fruits, from fruit jellies to candies, but also demonstrating a “product innovation + ecological symbiosis” solution. Founder Yang Fan repeatedly emphasized: “We aim to upgrade distributors into service leaders, working with brand owners to help retail terminals select the right products.”

Liu Liu Mei has chosen to shift from a transactional relationship with distributors to a symbiotic one, which is key to unlocking the current transformation in the snack industry.

1. Scenario-based Channel Precise Matching

“No scenario, no product”—this is Liu Liu Mei’s golden rule for product development. Different products tailored for various scenarios also offer channels more suitable options.

Take the electrolyte ice jelly series as an example. This product precisely targets hydration and electrolyte replenishment during summer sports. Unlike traditional ice pops, it adds potassium and sodium minerals, with electrolytes ≥300mg, creating a healthy frozen product that offers the convenience of “room temperature storage and frozen consumption,” and is distributed in convenience stores, supermarkets, and snack shops. In just two months of 2024, it sold over 600k boxes, and this year, the rollout started two months earlier.

Another example is the “Daily Breakfast Prune,” developed for the high-frequency, essential breakfast scenario, helping sales channels avoid fierce competition during traditional snack periods and opening up a new consumer growth space.

“Chenpi Plum Strips,” combining medicinal and edible ingredients of dried tangerine peel and plum meat, entered the Chinese health snack market, offering high-value products and expanding the “light health” daily consumption scene.

This scenario-based thinking runs through Liu Liu Mei’s entire product line: spring’s popular Peach Oolong Plum Jelly, Zhizhi Apple Green Plum Jelly focusing on “light and fresh enjoyment”; Wu Mei Hawthorn Soft Candy targeting “kids’ flavor-opening神器”; super fruit and vegetable series aimed at “daily fruit and vegetable nutrition supplementation”… Each product has a clear scenario positioning, providing diverse options tailored to channel sales characteristics.

2. Seasonal New Products with Traffic Support

Unlike traditional snack brands’ “two waves per year” marketing rhythm (ordinary + Chinese New Year), Liu Liu Mei pioneered a “four-season strategy”—each season features exclusive new products and matching marketing themes. For example, during the spring planting season, limited-edition Peach Oolong Plum Jelly and Zhizhi Apple Green Plum Jelly focus on “light and fresh enjoyment.”

Meanwhile, the promotion of plum jelly will run throughout the year, continuously empowering channels and distributors with traffic. “How we market each season is under research,” Yang Fan emphasized. As category experts, Liu Liu Mei leads the rhythm of annual key marketing points, paving the way for channel traffic.

Although this four-season approach presents significant challenges for R&D, branding, and channel operations, it sustains market enthusiasm and channel momentum. The jasmine green grape flavor of plum jelly is a typical example—launched in 2025, it sold over 100 million units that year, becoming the top flavor of plum jelly.

Liu Liu Mei also builds emotional value through IP-based operations: the new brand “Nida” features primitive characters like “Apple Chief” and “Mango Warrior,” creating a product matrix that combines health experience and emotional appeal. Plans include plush toys, creative gift boxes, and other peripherals to increase brand traffic.

3. Customized Products to Enhance Channel Differentiation

Another prominent feature in Liu Liu Mei’s new product matrix is “same product, different specifications”—tailoring different sizes and pricing strategies for different channels and consumer groups.

For example, the NFC plum jelly series adopts differentiated layouts: OT (hypermarkets) focus on maximum cost performance; TT (convenience stores) meet immediate consumption needs; DS (snack shops) offer exclusive packaging with different pricing from TT and OT.

In display strategies, Liu Liu Mei has detailed shelf display standards for each channel, ensuring differentiated features and maintaining the category’s top position in PSD (single store daily sales).

By deploying varied product matrices, Liu Liu Mei establishes an ecological, systematic sales strategy with each channel, reducing unnecessary internal competition.

4. Extreme Pursuit of “Health Attributes”

In the wave of health trends, Liu Liu Mei has chosen a “heavy asset, slow effort” path—building competitive barriers from the supply chain source. Using a C2B model, it connects channel vendors and distributors to serve consumers in reverse.

As Yang Fan said, “We aim to upgrade distributors into service leaders, working with brand owners to help retail terminals select the right products.”

Take the Western plum as an example. Liu Liu Mei is the largest importer of Chilean Western plums in China, with an annual import volume exceeding 10k tons, accounting for one-sixth of Chile’s total dried Western plum production. Since February, these plums have been stored in specialized cold storage to ensure year-round supply stability and consistent quality. Chilean seedless large Western plums are sugar-free, fat-free, rich in dietary fiber, and recommended by the Chilean consulate. This dedication to quality helped Liu Liu Mei sell 1 million packs of Western plums through Sam’s Club during the 2026 Spring Festival.

The “hit plum and hawthorn soft candies” are also a typical example. This product overcame technical barriers related to low pH in soft candies, using Liu Liu Mei’s self-developed plum essence as the core, coated with hawthorn pulp, achieving “zero artificial coloring, zero preservatives, rich in vitamin C,” becoming a flavor-opening神器 for children.

Ecological Symbiosis: Redefining the Relationship Between Brand Owners and Channels

The deeper significance of Liu Liu Mei’s new product launches is not just product innovation but conveying a new cooperative paradigm—shifting from “buy-sell” to “ecological symbiosis.”

By focusing on green plums, a traditional Chinese ingredient, and taking the “sour” as its core flavor, Liu Liu Mei continuously innovates categories. It has established a full industry chain from planting, processing, to sales, and promoted standardization and industrialization of green plum products. Today, Chinese green plum Liu Liu Mei has been popular for 25 years.

Matthew Wilcox in “The Principles of Bestsellers” mentions: “Perfect marketing should balance surprise and familiarity, related yet unexpected.” New products like Liu Liu Mei, plum jelly, Western plums, Nida, and hit plum aim to achieve the “triangle of health, deliciousness, and functionality.”

From the supply chain perspective, Liu Liu Mei has built a full industry chain from planting, processing, to sales, promoting the standardization and industrialization of green plum products.

From the industry perspective, Liu Liu Mei’s “ecological competition” concept attempts to break the zero-sum game where brand owners seek profits, distributors seek rebates, and retailers seek entrance fees. Through “product innovation + ecological symbiosis,” Liu Liu Mei offers a new approach for the entire industry.

As founder Yang Fan said: “Winning people’s hearts is winning the world. What is people’s hearts? It’s the consumer’s mind. We invest all resources into product innovation to bring good products to consumers, while working with our channel partners, retailers, and distributors to serve users.”

In the trillion-dollar snack market, Liu Liu Mei is writing a new story about “certainty” in its own way.