---
title: "A Small County, 130 Billion Yuan a Year: The Underestimated Bulk Snack Business"
description: "The Chinese people's obsession with snacks underpins a market exceeding 1.4 trillion yuan. Despite claims of snacks being unhealthy, consumption remains high, and the industry, after two years of low growth, is again experiencing rapid growth in both volume and price. In 2024, bulk snack stores surpassed supermarkets and e-commerce with a 37% share, becoming the largest sales channel for snacks."
author: "快刀财经编辑部"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2026-04-14"
categories: "Consumer & Categories, E-commerce & Instant Retail, Retail Formats"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Dyonz2WRJXrmP6ozgZpbEg"
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citation: "快刀财经编辑部. “A Small County, 130 Billion Yuan a Year: The Underestimated Bulk Snack Business.” New Distribution, 2026-04-14. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/a-small-county-130-billion-yuan-a-year-the-underestimated-bulk-snack-bus-0efba902/"
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---

# A Small County, 130 Billion Yuan a Year: The Underestimated Bulk Snack Business

> The Chinese people's obsession with snacks underpins a market exceeding 1.4 trillion yuan. Despite claims of snacks being unhealthy, consumption remains high, and the industry, after two years of low growth, is again experiencing rapid growth in both volume and price. In 2024, bulk snack stores surpassed supermarkets and e-commerce with a 37% share, becoming the largest sales channel for snacks.

The Chinese people's obsession with snacks is immense, underpinning a market exceeding 1.4 trillion yuan.
While people often say snacks are unhealthy, they certainly don't hold back from eating them. This industry, which has rarely seen a downturn, has entered another phase of rapid growth in both volume and price after ending a two-year period of low growth.
Especially in recent years, bulk snack stores have opened across the country, and in 2024, with a 37% share, they surpassed supermarkets (22%) and e-commerce (20%) for the first time, becoming the largest sales channel for snacks.
When you walk into stores like Mingming Henmang or Haoxianglai, pick up a bag of puffed food for about two yuan, or a few yuan for a bag of hand-torn bread; or when you grab a box of snacks for 9.9 yuan with free shipping on Douyin live streams or Pinduoduo, you probably won't notice the inconspicuous production address on the packaging—Zhangzhou City, Fujian Province.
This is a "white-label snack kingdom" supported by various bulk snacks.
Although it hasn't produced established brands like Dali from Quanzhou or Panpan from Jinjiang, it has become the "invisible champion" of China's snack industry through extreme supply chain efficiency and complete industry chain support.
**The Underestimated Bulk Snack Business**
The cheap snack business is far more profitable than imagined.
When you stuff your shopping basket with chips and nuts at a bulk snack store, the stock market behind it is also soaring with multiple limit-ups.
In the first half of 2025, the "growth king" on the A-share market was Wanchen Group (65% white-label snack share), which originated in Zhangzhou.
In three years, the stock price soared from 10.17 yuan per share to a peak of nearly 200 yuan, a maximum increase of almost 20 times.
In the same financial report, shareholders received net profits of up to 471 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 50,358.8%.
503 times—many internet companies that caught the right wave would have to line up behind.
Trends always rotate; corners once ignored can become hot spots everyone fights for.
White-label snacks, once at the bottom of the chain, are now at an upward turning point.
In an era full of guides like "Big Brand Snack Supplier Revealed" and "Same Factory Food Reviews," even if these products mostly come from brands "you've never heard of," consumer acceptance is much more tolerant than before.
There is no unified definition for so-called "white labels."
Generally, white labels are brands backed by industrial belts, directly supplied by manufacturers or channel distributors, sitting between well-known traditional brands and "no-name products."
The founder of Three Squirrels once publicly stated, "In China's trillion-yuan snack market, brands only account for 30%, and 70% are white labels."
Although they have low visibility and presence, white labels often have a price advantage in popular snack categories.
In other words, new white labels are not without brands; they just lack brand premium.
They rely on mature industrial belt advantages, cut out middlemen and marketing costs, and offer similar quality at half or even one-third the price of big brands.
Most of the profits in bulk stores come from these "non-big-brand" snacks.
Even those who never enter bulk snack stores or never buy bulk snacks online have likely eaten many "white-label snacks," unless they never go out.
While waiting for a table at Haidilao, you grab a handful of crispy Tiger Tooth Crisps and finish the whole plate without realizing; at the barbershop, you chew on the mints offered at the front desk while scrolling through short videos to ease the wait; at the 4S shop for car maintenance, the various snacks in the waiting area become the best way to pass the time.
To prevent you from leaving out of impatience, these free snacks you hardly notice or forget after eating are called "waiting snacks," a secret weapon for offline stores to retain customer goodwill at low cost.
Especially in front of chain restaurants in shopping malls, young people queuing up turn various snacks, tea, and ice cream into a budget-friendly "moving feast," consuming a lot of calories before even having a proper meal.
In all these scenarios, it's basically the "white labels" that dominate. Many brands don't rely on C-end traffic but still make big money quietly behind the scenes.
The catfish stirring up the snack market is a "school of fish" composed of small players.
**Zhangzhou: From China's Canned Food Capital to White-Label Snack Kingdom**
Zhangzhou didn't become the snack capital just by riding the trend; it evolved step by step from the canned food industry, weaving a snack map covering 1.4 billion Chinese people with mountains and seas as threads and industry as the shuttle.
Zhangzhou's food industry began with canned food.
In 1936, Zhangzhou Canned Food Factory was established, one of the earliest in China.
Located in the Minnan Golden Triangle, Zhangzhou faces the Taiwan Strait to the east and borders Chaoshan, Guangdong to the south. Although not suitable for heavy industry due to national strategic positioning, it enjoys the reputation of "Land of Flowers and Fruits."
With a warm and humid climate and fertile soil where "even a hoe handle can sprout," Zhangzhou provides abundant raw materials for its food industry.
Agricultural products such as Pinghe Guanxi pomelo, Yunxiao loquat, Fugong bayberry, and Tianbao banana are geographical indication products, with Zhangzhou accounting for over 90% of national output; the planting area and output of edible fungi, bamboo shoots, and vegetables also rank among the top in Fujian Province.
The fishing boats of Dongshan Island bring abundant abalone, sea cucumber, and other aquatic products, ensuring a steady supply for aquatic snacks and canned goods.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, cans of golden mushrooms, sweet lychees, and tender asparagus crossed the seas, becoming golden business cards for China's export earnings.
In the 1980s, Zhangzhou's canned food industry entered a golden period, with mushroom can exports accounting for over 70% of the national total, and lychee, asparagus, and bamboo shoot can exports ranking first nationwide, making it a key local industry.
However, the industry's glory was short-lived, as it suffered a devastating blow in exports.
In 1989, the US FDA detained Chinese mushroom cans on the grounds of containing enterotoxin.
This directly caused a batch of mushroom can producers that relied mainly on the US market to fall into trouble; large enterprises barely managed, while small ones were forced out.
It wasn't until the international conference on mushroom products ten years later that the expert group's final argument cleared the name of those Chinese mushroom cans, but the devastating impact on the industry was real for domestic enterprises.
Many canneries in Fuzhou closed down, and Zhangzhou Canned Food Factory was forced to transform its products. In the early 21st century, with China's accession to the WTO, they actively united to respond to lawsuits and break tariffs, and canned food exports began to recover significantly.
Amid the waves of the canned food industry, sparks of the food industry were born.
The history of canned food exports left Zhangzhou with valuable industrial heritage.
A large number of industrial workers skilled in food processing, high-temperature sterilization, and vacuum preservation; strict quality control systems aligned with Europe, America, and Japan; and a complete upstream and downstream supporting industry around canned food, including tinplate cans, packaging printing, food machinery, and cold chain logistics.
For example, companies producing fruit cans can also provide dried fruit, jam, and other raw materials for white-label snacks.
These accumulated technologies and production capacities are the foundation for Zhangzhou's entry into the leisure food industry.
Local Hai Xin Group entered biscuit production, launching Danfu waffles, pioneering soft biscuits in China; companies like Ranli, Caleton, and Haoshi gradually established themselves in bread, cake, and other categories, all laying the groundwork for the later explosion of white-label snacks.
The advantages of ports like Zhangzhou Port and Gulei Port carry products across the seas; the Xiamen-Shenzhen Railway and Shenhai Expressway pass through, and it's only an hour's drive to Xiamen Port, sending Zhangzhou snacks nationwide and worldwide.
Meanwhile, the Zhangzhou government has led the creation of industrial parks such as Longhai Leisure Food Industrial Park and Zhangpu Agricultural Products Processing Park to guide enterprise clustering.
As of 2024, Zhangzhou, the "world kitchen," has 752 food industry enterprises above designated size, with an output value of 133.8 billion yuan and food exports of 29.3 billion yuan, ranking first among prefecture-level cities nationwide for many years.
Among them, Longhai District alone has nearly a thousand food enterprises, with an output value exceeding 60 billion yuan, accounting for one-tenth of Fujian Province's total food industry output.
From "making cans for the world" to "making snacks for the Chinese," Zhangzhou has completed a magnificent industrial transformation.
**At the Table: The "Feeding Logic" of the Small Fish School**
The most obvious feature of Zhangzhou's snack industry is its invisibility.
Long focused on OEM and foreign trade, Zhangzhou enterprises' core competitiveness lies in supply chain costs and relatively flexible production efficiency, but branding has indeed been a long-standing weakness.
Even when a hit product sells 400 million yuan a year, consumers don't know the brand behind it. For example, Sam's Club's popular beef biscuits are produced by Zhangzhou Xinxing Food.
Changsha's Chayanyuese, with annual sales exceeding 100 million yuan for its bread crisps, has its OEM factory in Zhangzhou; Oriental Selection's best-selling toast also comes from Zhangzhou; and Haidilao's Tiger Tooth Crisps, available nationwide, are also produced in Zhangzhou.
For Zhangzhou, there has been a "lost two decades" in brand building.
Compared to neighboring Jinjiang's strategy of "brand first, brand drives industry," Zhangzhou leans more toward a model of "factory first, supply chain for brand."
In the early years, Jinjiang seized the golden age of traditional media, using saturation marketing to quickly capture national consumer awareness.
In 2003, Yake signed Zhou Xun, spent 20 million yuan on CCTV ads, and overnight became a leader in the domestic candy sector; Panpan tied itself to top sports IPs like the Asian Games and Olympics, signed first-tier celebrities, and spread French-style bread across the country within a few years.
For a time, Jinjiang brands followed suit, completing several leaps from local enterprises to national brands in a very short period.
Mention jelly, and you think of Qinqin and Crayon Shin-chan; mention candy, and you think of Yake and Jinguan; mention French-style bread, and you think of Panpan and Daliyuan.
In contrast, Zhangzhou missed the golden 20 years of branding, with almost no national brand marketing campaigns in the past decades, always quietly doing OEM.
Instead of marketing like Jinjiang, Zhangzhou follows a "hit product traffic" route.
By leveraging extreme cost performance and the label of "big brand alternative" to drive platform traffic, it hardly does long-term brand building, instead using new e-commerce platforms like Pinduoduo and Douyin to capture those "invisible" markets.
With weak brand premium, it only earns processing fees from a wave of hit products and new products through scale.
But sometimes, brand lifecycle and risk resistance are not equivalent.
In Jinjiang's long-termism, many leading brands have survived for over 30 years, weathering multiple channel changes and consumption upgrades, still stable in the market. Even with product iterations and channel shifts, the brand awareness accumulated over decades remains, rarely falling into trouble due to fluctuations in a single channel or product.
Zhangzhou's "hit product" logic is not as "low-end" as outsiders claim.
A hit product may be popular for half a year to a year, seemingly without sustained brand building, disappearing after the hype fades, with a very short lifecycle.
But Zhangzhou has always been in the business of "chasing trends."
Like small fish in the ocean, they move together, find food, eat quickly, and then immediately seek the next target.
In the mouths of increasingly novelty-seeking consumers, Zhangzhou may not make money from a single product long-term, but the first wave of money from "new snacks" is likely to land in the pockets of Zhangzhou enterprises.
Big fish swim slowly; by the time large enterprises enter a category, the small fish have already eaten the first crab and moved on to the next destination.
No snack is forever fresh, but there are always fresh snacks.
From the canned food capital to the white-label snack kingdom, Zhangzhou's story is one of "invisible factories" stocking Chinese people's snack cabinets.
In the new consumption era, capital's narrative logic often adds halos to brands, raising voices and valuations, but for consumers, beyond brands, the industrial belt itself is also a core competitiveness.
The small business without a brand should not be underestimated.


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 快刀财经编辑部
- Published: 2026-04-14
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/a-small-county-130-billion-yuan-a-year-the-underestimated-bulk-snack-bus-0efba902/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Dyonz2WRJXrmP6ozgZpbEg

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