On May 31, Fresh Hema announced its establishment of a new products incubation center — "Fresh Hema X Booster". This center aims to unblock investment and financing, product R&D, supply chain support, marketing and promotion, and other internal and external resources to conduct incubation, acceleration, and strategic investment for potential new brands, product lines, and commodities. It is also set to roll out "Five Zeros" measures for partners, namely zero start-up funds, zero thresholds for cooperation, zero channel cost, zero refund cost, and zero-charged marketing packs.

Meanwhile, Fresh Hema, together with Roland Berger, released New Trends for Fresh Life 2021: White Paper on Food Industry. This white paper relies on Fresh Hema's online and offline consumption data to conduct an analysis on 5 consumption upgrading directions and 10 new trends behind the new consumption phenomenon. Attention is paid to non-mainstream trends like instant soak sauce, low-alcohol highball drinks, and functional snacks. The fast-growing retail catering industry is considered a new potentially promising area after the pandemic.

Hou Yi, President of Fresh Hema, suggested that it's the deep understanding of consumers and the correct judgment of consumption trends that win consumers' recognition over the last five years.

"In recent years, we have discovered that in spite of many new brands standing out with good product foundation, more of them lack sufficient understanding of consumers or are hindered by the high costs on channel and traffic acquisition. Fresh Hema hopes to bridge cooperation with these partners to create more premium and unique commodities for consumers." Hou mentioned.

As the New Products Incubation Center is a new link of Fresh Hema's supply chain construction and one of the most important construction works in this year, Fresh Hema has made a three-year preparation for "all products which deserve to be re-made in the new consumption era".

According to some analysis reports, the food industry with dense capital distribution in recent years seems to be a considerably competitive market, whereas, in China, a country with food as the first necessity of its people, the field of food and beverage is still commonly known as the "best racetrack". Especially during the year after the pandemic, the food and beverage industry is experiencing a thorough shift to a new pattern. The springing-up opportunities for new brands and the possibility for traditional time-honored brands to re-boost their own businesses are responding to the enormous market opportunities brought by the upgrading trend of consumption.

Taking the time-honored Chinese brand of Baishiyi Dried Salted Duck as an example, although the brand has its own traditional and sophisticated production process, it still fails to accord with the new consumption trend, which makes itself lag behind its peers in product R&D. Over the last three years of cooperation and by utilizing Fresh Hema's insights of the new consumption trend and open resources on the platform, Baishiyi Dried Salted Duck not only has carried out overall upgrading for the whole supply chain in its factory, but also has built up a digital central kitchen together with Fresh Hema in order to retail its landmark specialties such as marinaded pig ear in red chili oil, sweet-marinaded duck, and Fengdu spicy chicken. Nowadays, Baishiyi Dried Salted Duck rolls out a new product almost every month. The significant improvement of its product R&D capacity rockets up its annual sales volume by 20%.

In addition, other Chongqing's well-known brands of delicacy like Zhang's Duck and Rongchang goose also carry out overall upgrading by drawing support from Fresh Hema in terms of technology, supply chain, and channel capacity. The most typical upgrading comes to the transformation of the original vacuum-packed into a freshness-locked one with shorter shelf life, satisfying consumer's requirements for extremely fresh food.

From the perspective of insiders, apart from its insights into online and offline consumers, capacities of product R&D, and innovation, Fresh Hema, most importantly, has built up a network of the supply chain connecting nearly 300 stores across the country through years of continuous efforts, which is also a trump card of Fresh Hema itself to layout in the food industry.

In order to set up an incubation platform, a new ecological chain for retailing commodities will come into being with Fresh Hema as its core, which is a whole-chain ecological system ranging from product R&D, marketing to continuous iteration and optimization. The new ecological chain will convert from an original single operation to fleet operation, upgrading Fresh Hema's business pattern and core competitiveness so as to foster an ecosystem like that of Apple for app developers.

Besides, Fresh Hema X Booster will also push forward the improvement of operational capability for its own brands to further widen the competitive gap between itself and traditional stores, fresh e-commerce platforms, and other warehouse clubs.

It is learned that the Fresh Hema X Booster incubation center will be under the operation of a team led by Guo Xulin, Assistant to Fresh Hema's President. The Fresh Hema X Booster will pay close attention to the key fields of leading brands in the FMCG industry, emerging online popular brands, time-honored brands with the ambition to re-boost its business, and food and beverage brands striving to retail their products.