Yuan Guobao
Internet trend observer, well-known financial writer, founder of New Alliance, senior media person, new media marketing and brand communication expert.
Brother said
Financing continues, brands multiply, and children's snacks become fragrant
Summary of this article: On June 15, 2020, the "General Requirements for Children's Snacks" was officially implemented, ending the gap in the domestic standard for children's snacks. In this context, the heat of the children's snack market has reached a new height, more and more entrants, capital is frantically pouring in, and online and offline efforts are in unison... Thus allowing children's snacks to complete the gorgeous transformation from niche to hundreds of billions of snack markets.
1. Financing continues, the brand multiplies, and children's snacks become fragrant?
2. The secret to capturing parents and children is to do "subtraction" from snacks?
3. Children's snacks are caught in the "homogenization" war, and differentiation can break through?
Snacks, due to the vast market space and high profit margins, have always been the field of capital competition. Among them, the fertile soil of leisure snacks has grown famous snack brands such as three squirrels, good shops, and hundred grass flavors.
However, from the current point of view, the growth of leisure snacks has entered a certain bottleneck period, but children's snacks, with people paying more and more attention to children's nutrition and health, the establishment of industry-related standards is expected to become another major growth curve of snacks.
Children have become an important "financier" of the snack market, and the children's snack market has also become another major snack field in the capital competition.
Brands multiplied, financing continued, children's snacks into a delicious feast?
Since the introduction of the three-child policy and the implementation of the "General Standard for Children's Snacks", new brands of children's snacks have emerged, and capital has also greatly promoted the development of the track.
The introduction of the three-child policy means that with the further opening up of family planning in China, the birth rate and the proportion of children in the future will increase to a certain extent.
The improvement of the children's base will bring about the expansion of the scale of the children's snack consumption market. Some relevant institutions expect that from 2020 to 2027, the size of China's children's snack market will rise from 53.644 billion yuan to 94.428 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 7.96%.
The implementation of the "Common Standard for Children's Snacks" not only puts forward and clarifies the concept of children's snacks for the first time, but also puts forward requirements for its nutrition and health, so that children can "be safe on the tip of the tongue", have further guarantees, and also let snack giants and entrepreneurs smell the opportunity.
So we see that in June 2020, just after the implementation of the standard, there were three new children's snack brands, namely the children's health food brand "Little Yellow Elephant", the three squirrel baby and children's food sub-brand "Deer Blue", and the Beiyinmei high-end children's health snack sub-brand "Menglebao".
Then, in September 2020, baby and children's food brand "Akita Manjin, children's food brand " Kai Xu Duo Cat Cat"; in February 2021, Mint Healthy Children's Nutrition sub-brand "Peppermint Forest", New Hope high-end children's health food sub-brand "Elephant Daddy Planet";
In April 2021, the children's nutrition snack brand "full score cow cow"; in 2021, the children's snack brand BBMVP, Vegetable Glenel... And other emerging brands have also been launched.
It can be seen that from the beginning of the snack giants have launched sub-brands, to the establishment of various emerging children's snack brands, children's snacks this big cake, attracting more and more entrepreneurs to enter, more and more people share food.
And this cornucopia full of growth potential naturally makes many capitals enter the game, after all, if you bet on the treasure, the next "three squirrels" that support the children's snack class may not be certain.
As a result, the baby is hungry, nest small buds in 5 months, the financing rounds reached 3 rounds, 2 rounds, and their financing amount is more than 100 million, favored by capital.
In addition, emerging brands have received financing at the beginning of their establishment.
On March 18, Xiao Huangxiang completed an angel round investment of tens of millions of yuan; QiXu Duo Cat won a round of 10 million DOLLARs financing on March 31; and Full Score Niu Niu and Vegetable Gele also recently obtained tens of millions of yuan of angel round financing...
A battle for the enclosure of children's snacks has sounded the horn.
Capture parents and children, the secret is to do "subtraction" from snacks?
When healthy nutrition becomes the number one indicator, the "subtraction" of snacks has become the number one selling point.
Looking at the posts on children's snacks on the Little Red Book, there is an increasingly obvious trend, that is, the standards of snacks that mothers choose for babies and young children are becoming more and more stringent.
There is a mother in the post has such a paragraph: "I have more criteria for my baby to choose snacks: less sugar, no salt, no pigments, no preservatives, no antibiotics, no hormones, etc., and the nutritional components must also meet the baby's daily needs." If it does not meet the criteria, it will not be purchased".
This passage reveals two key points, one is that parents are now paying more and more attention to the health indicators of children's snacks, many additives that increase the flavor of food have been beaten into the "cold palace", and the elements that are not beneficial to the body must also control the amount and degree.
This is also confirmed in the "Children's Snacks Market Research White Paper", which shows that when parents buy children's snacks, natural, healthy and additive-free are the most important factors when they buy, accounting for 63.5%.
The second is that the nutritional content of children's snacks should keep up with the growth needs of children, as emphasized in the "General Standards for Children's Snacks", children's snacks are foods that can be used to supplement nutrition and balance nutrition.
Therefore, according to the demand put forward by the consumer market, in order to comply with the changes in the market, many companies have recently launched new products for children's snacks, and have begun to do "subtraction".
For example, the herb flavor "Tong An An Series" maximizes the degreasing, salt, and sugar removal. Deep-fried foods are converted into low-temperature baking, hydrolyzed plant protein flavoring, reducing the use of condiments such as salt, monosodium glutamate, soy sauce, replacing white sugar with isomalto-oligosaccharide, and making healthy children's snacks throughout the road.
The good shop "good food fairy" also reduces sugar, oil and salt, and strives to achieve zero addition of flavors and pigments, restore the natural taste of food, and maintain the marketing of food.
In addition to subtracting food, children's snacks should also take into account the balance of nutrition, and at this point, fawn blue is one of the best.
All products of Fawn Blue Blue strictly implement the unified standards of infant food; strengthen the addition of calcium, iron and zinc and other nutrients to meet the growth needs of infants and young children; six additive-free, for all raw materials are the best origin ... These are the advantages of fawn blue.
And what does such "subtraction" bring to the enterprise? We can analyze it from the real data of the market
According to the "2020 Tmall Children's Snacks Market Analysis Report", among the representative concept sales of Tmall in the second half of 2020, the "0 addition" concept ranked first with sales of 41.738 million yuan, followed by nutritional children's snacks with sales of 9.916 million yuan, followed by healthy children's snacks with sales of 7.117 million yuan.
And from the perspective of the entire trend line, the sales of children's snacks with the concept of "0 add" will be higher than that of snacks in other categories and concepts.
Such a report is enough to prove that in the current era of especially the pursuit of health, in order to reduce the emergence of problems such as childhood obesity, high fat, and high salt, the consumer market generally has a demand for health upgrades for snacks.
This not only captured the hearts of parents and children, but also gave birth to the blue ocean market of healthy children's snacks.
Children's snacks are caught in the "homogenization" war, and differentiation can break through?
There is no shortage of "gold lords" in children's snacks, what is missing is differentiated products and a strong moat.
According to the "2020 Children's Snack Industry Marketing Trend Insights", due to the high education level of parents in the new era, the proportion of investment in "refined baby raising" is getting higher and higher, and the average cost of buying snacks for children each month is close to 800 yuan.
At the same time, the survey also shows that the concept of snacks for snacks in the new era has changed greatly, from reluctance to let children eat junk food, to take the initiative to choose nutritious and healthy snacks for children, which has become the new normal.
Coupled with the proposal and implementation of China's three Taiwan policies, there will be a continuous increase in the number of newborn babies and more children in the future. The children's snack market is naturally full of greater development potential and demand.
However, from the current development status, although the children's snack market has good development prospects, the market is huge, and there are only a lot more entrants, no brand has formed a certain effect, and the potential of the children's snack market has not been released. And mainly because the current children's snack homogenization is serious, there is no innovation.
Mintel data shows that the world's top ten children's snack food category in the past five years has not changed over the years, and it is still fruit snacks that occupy the head, followed by cereals, potatoes and so on.
It can be said that children's snacks are almost all categories extended from leisure snacks, although they are market segments, but category innovation is insufficient.
A major reason for the lack of innovation and serious homogenization is because the phenomenon of foundry is obvious, and the R & D and production capacity of enterprises is insufficient.
According to media reports, the number of infant food brands in China is at least more than 2500, but nearly 90% are OEM production. Even the head brand three squirrels, good shops, etc. are the same.
However, it is worth noting that the most important thing for infant food is raw material and processing management, and the foundry model is likely to lead to uncontrolled product quality.
And a foundry company often not only oem a brand, which leads to the fact that different brands of products may use the same raw materials, and the flavor of eating is also consistent, which will eventually lead to the brand difficult to retain loyal users and encircle their own territory.
After all, if the flavors of children's snacks are similar, with the increasing popularity of high standards of snack food, why do snack brands attract users?
Therefore, children's snack brands must go out of the way of differentiation. From the current point of view, the differentiation is mainly reflected in two aspects, one is the flavor of the category, and the other is in the additional service.
To achieve the difference in category flavor, behind it is more of a strengthening of research and development. That is to say, enterprises should increase investment in research and development, pay attention to the taste, taste, product form, packaging style, health and nutrition and other multi-dimensional food research and development, and then be able to have innovative results.
At the same time, even if the self-processing mode cannot be adopted, it is necessary to strictly screen the foundry, and it is necessary to strictly require each link of the processing to ensure the flavor characteristics and safety and quality of the product.
And in addition to relying on product and process innovation to attract users, brands must strive to create some added value for products in order to successfully go out of the circle.
Take Fawn Blue Blue, for example, as a children's snack brand, it has launched an online dietitian consultation service that provides an irresistible added value for the purchase of products.
According to the person in charge of Fawn Blue Blue, online nutrition consulting services can help new mothers solve the difficulties encountered in parenting, and provide them with free counseling services in parenting and feeding.
This cuts to a major pain point for new mothers and provides better brand extension services. At the same time, the online nutrition consultant also made the brand of Fawn Blue Blue more "professional" attributes, and built a differentiated moat belonging to Fawn Blue Blue.
In fact, the children's snack market is a new outlet and field, whether it is a snack giant, or an emerging brand are promising, as for who can seize the market, it depends on who can take the lead in differentiating the breakthrough and win more parents and children's "preference".