---
title: "A 1-Yuan Small Fish Generates 1 Billion in Revenue"
description: "Recently, the performance forecast for 2023 released by Jinzai Food, the 'first listed company in fish snacks,' shows that the company expects to achieve a net profit of 201 million to 213 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 61.00% to 71.00%. The announcement also stated that the company's operating revenue exceeded 2 billion yuan in 2023, with dried small fish as the core product accounting for over 60% of the performance. This means that Jinzai's dried small fish has grown into a billion-yuan-level single product. How did Jinzai Food turn a pack of dried small fish into a 1-billion-yuan product?"
author: "沐九九"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2024-01-31"
language: "en"
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# A 1-Yuan Small Fish Generates 1 Billion in Revenue

> Recently, the performance forecast for 2023 released by Jinzai Food, the 'first listed company in fish snacks,' shows that the company expects to achieve a net profit of 201 million to 213 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 61.00% to 71.00%. The announcement also stated that the company's operating revenue exceeded 2 billion yuan in 2023, with dried small fish as the core product accounting for over 60% of the performance. This means that Jinzai's dried small fish has grown into a billion-yuan-level single product. How did Jinzai Food turn a pack of dried small fish into a 1-billion-yuan product?

Recently, the performance forecast for 2023 released by Jinzai Food, the 'first listed company in fish snacks,' shows that the company expects to achieve a net profit of 201 million to 213 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 61.00% to 71.00%. The announcement also stated that the company's operating revenue exceeded 2 billion yuan in 2023, with dried small fish as the core product accounting for over 60% of the performance. This means that Jinzai's dried small fish has grown into a billion-yuan-level single product. **How did Jinzai Food turn a pack of dried small fish into a 1-billion-yuan product?**
**Focusing on the Dried Small Fish Category**
In 2010, Zhou Jinsong founded Jinzai Food in his hometown Yueyang. Before that, Zhou had been in business for over 20 years, and his Pingjiang sauce dried tofu in Luoyang had once achieved a production value of 10 billion yuan. However, as market competition intensified and the drawbacks of rapid expansion became apparent, Zhou's sauce dried tofu business encountered obstacles in the later period. Forced to close the factory, he returned to Yueyang to start anew. Located by Dongting Lake, Yueyang is not only known for its long history of making sauce dried tofu and soybean products but also as a land of fish and rice, rich in fish resources, including Hunan specialty fish such as silverfish, mandarin fish, and bighead carp, as well as grass carp, carp, and crucian carp. Therefore, when Zhou returned to Yueyang, many local factories were already making fish snacks, but due to uneven quality, they had not formed a scale. Image source/Pixabay
On this basis, Zhou Jinsong, who had returned to his hometown, shifted his focus from sauce dried tofu to fish snacks, and inspired by the local dish fire-roasted fish, he started making Jinzai small fish. However, for Zhou, who had been in business for many years and had a keen eye, his plan for fish snacks was by no means limited to a small workshop. Therefore, from the beginning, Jinzai's business model differed from the more than 20 local small workshops.
**First, in terms of fish species, Zhou chose to go far rather than near, selecting anchovies from Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam as raw materials.** As a small marine fish, anchovies are relatively abundant, growing in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and other major oceans worldwide, with a growth cycle of about one year. Their meat is delicious and chewy, and they are rich in high-quality protein. It is understood that anchovies contain 18-20.1g of protein, 5.0g of fat, and 2.0-2.5g of minerals per 100g of edible portion, and the content of minerals, VA, VE, etc., is much higher than that of lake fish of equal weight. In addition, the price of anchovies is relatively low. At the same time, by building self-owned sea fish production bases, direct sourcing from origin, and establishing stable cooperative relationships with suppliers from different sea areas, Jinzai Food can also reduce price fluctuations and lower procurement costs. Generally, the average procurement price of Jinzai anchovy dried fish is about 16 yuan per kilogram, accounting for only 30%-40% of the main business cost, similar to packaging material costs.
**Secondly, in terms of production methods, although the previous experience in making sauce dried tofu gave Jinzai unique techniques and recipes that could be applied to fish snack production, fish are clearly more complex to handle than soybean products.** It is understood that the production of fish products requires multiple steps including raw material screening, soaking, washing, high-temperature frying, marinating, mixing, packaging, and water treatment. To this end, after receiving 300 million yuan in investment from Legend Holdings' Jiawo Group in 2016, Jinzai immediately invested in the construction of an automated small fish production base. Through automation upgrades, the standardization of Jinzai's fish products improved, and efficiency and capacity increased significantly. According to Hunan Daily, the entire process from raw fish processing to semi-finished products and finally sterilization takes about two hours. In 2022, Jinzai Food's annual production capacity for fish products reached 22,500 tons. Since 2014, the Pingjiang production base alone has produced an average of about 10 million packs of dried fish per day. At the same time, Jinzai Food also took the lead in breaking through traditional limitations and process bottlenecks, developing a process with no preservatives added, pioneering the fish snack industry. Of course, during this period, Jinzai Food also successively developed multiple products such as vegetarian meat, konjac, quail eggs, and chicken feet, but dried fish has always been the main source of Jinzai's revenue. In 2022, fish products achieved operating revenue of 1.026 billion yuan, accounting for 70.15% of total revenue.
**Marketing and Channels as Dual Drivers, Pricing Plays a Key Role**
Sales performance growth is naturally based on the product, but marketing and channels are also key. In 2013, Jinzai officially announced Wang Han as its brand image spokesperson. Subsequently, relying on the influence of Wang Han as a well-known host, the slogan 'Jinzai thick dried tofu, thick Chinese flavor' quickly spread, and the dried small fish with Wang Han's portrait on the packaging were sold to farther places. Since then, Jinzai Food has kept up with the times, reaching and communicating with young people in ways they like, including choosing well-known actors as spokespersons and promoting on multiple platforms such as elevator media, Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu. For example, paying attention to the trend of live-streaming e-commerce, Jinzai Food not only laid out this sector early but also had its founder personally appear in live streams, making surprise visits to the company's live room for product promotion. Previously, Zhou Jinsong also cooperated with top influencers like Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, and in the former cooperation, he achieved sales of 4 million yuan in snacks in one night. While online marketing is hot, offline promotion continues. For example, in 2022, Jinzai Food successively carried out themed activities such as Fish Man Festival, Gaokao Season, and Factory Exploration. On January 13-14 this year, Jinzai Food also created a 'Dada Jishi' tasting promotion event in Shenzhen, attracting a large number of consumers. Subsequently, this event will be held in Guangzhou, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Hefei.
**The fundamental reason for not giving up offline despite strong online performance is that for fast-moving consumer goods like leisure snacks, the ultimate main battlefield must be offline.** This is no exception for Jinzai Food. Image source/Pixabay
Although Jinzai Food laid out online channels early and achieved outstanding results, with its deep-sea small fish ranking first in Taobao's fish snack category for several consecutive years, offline remains the main sales channel for Jinzai Food. From 2020 to 2022, Jinzai Food's offline sales were 741 million yuan, 903 million yuan, and 1.153 billion yuan, accounting for 81.46%, 81.29%, and 78.88% of total revenue, respectively. As of the end of 2022, Jinzai had 2,267 cooperative distributors, covering 300,000 sales terminals. At the same time, on the basis of the original circulation channels, Jinzai Food has been continuously developing modern channels such as KA, CVS, and BC in recent years, and has reached cooperation with over 100 snack specialty channels including Snacks Busy, Tangchao, Haoxianglai, and Laopodairen. In order to explore the ceiling of high-potential channels such as KA and CVS, Jinzai Food even carried out packaging upgrades, launching 'large packaging' products in addition to bulk packaging. It is worth mentioning that the launch of large packaging products not only helps Jinzai Food further expand product sales channels but also helps increase brand profits. This may be one of the reasons for Jinzai Food's performance growth. It is understood that the channel profit for Jinzai's classic packaging products is about 15%, while that for large packaging products is about 25%. According to Jiemian News, the 12g bulk Jinzai small fish sells for about 1.05 yuan per pack, while the corresponding large packaging product sells for 13.78 yuan per bag, containing 10 packs, equivalent to about 1.38 yuan per pack. This price is even higher on new retail platforms like Hema. In addition, in the first half of last year, sales revenue from Jinzai's large packaging products increased by 100% year-on-year.
Finding the right subcategory, combined with the multiple effects of marketing, channels, and products, may be the key to Jinzai Food breaking through 2 billion yuan, and the deep-sea small fish becoming a 1-billion-yuan single product.
**Conclusion** From market feedback and sales performance, Jinzai Food's big single product strategy is clearly effective, but it is also undeniable that the era of relying on one big single product to dominate the world has passed. Even if it quickly captures the market with first-mover advantages, many competitors will inevitably emerge later to share market share. Taking the fish product market that Jinzai focuses on as an example, industry data shows that by 2030, the leisure fish product market is expected to reach 60 billion yuan. On this basis, leisure snack brands including Three Squirrels, Mr. Beaver, and Snack Lab have launched corresponding fish snack products. **Therefore, what lies ahead for Jinzai Food is to quickly find its own second growth curve.** In fact, in recent years, Jinzai Food has been continuously expanding its product categories. For example, its quail egg product 'Xiaodan Yuanyuan' launched in 2022 has performed very well in its results. When responding to investor questions in October 2023, Jinzai Food stated that quail eggs have become the most outstanding performer among the company's three major categories. Since its launch about a year and a half ago, it has been in a state of rapid growth, breaking through the 100 million yuan mark in the third quarter, with monthly sales reaching 44 million yuan. It is currently the company's second largest single product and will be the company's next 1-billion-yuan single product. However, from a market competition perspective, the competitive pressure faced by Jinzai's quail eggs is not much less than that of its core big single product, deep-sea small fish. Due to lower production thresholds, snack brands including Weilong have launched egg products. **This means that it is clearly more difficult for Jinzai Food to 'leap over the dragon gate with eggs.'**
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