---
title: "Alibaba's Own Snack Brand: The Real Losers May Not Be Three Squirrels, Bestore, or Be & Cheery"
description: "Alibaba has quietly launched its own private-label snack brand, Bonbater (棒倍特), on Tmall Supermarket, signaling a potential shift in the online snack market. While the brand's current sales are modest, its access to platform traffic and brand endorsement could disrupt established players, though Alibaba's strategic intent likely extends beyond revenue to building a flexible supply chain and ecosystem moat."
author: "小军"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2020-03-20"
categories: "Consumer & Categories"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/i5e4kuXoXSK7Thge1790Ag"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E9%98%BF%E9%87%8C%E5%B7%B4%E5%B7%B4%E8%87%AA%E5%B7%B1%E5%81%9A%E9%9B%B6%E9%A3%9F-%E8%AF%A5%E9%A2%A4%E6%8A%96%E7%9A%84%E6%81%90%E6%80%95%E4%B8%8D%E6%98%AF%E4%B8%89%E5%8F%AA%E6%9D%BE%E9%BC%A0-%E8%89%AF%E5%93%81%E9%93%BA%E5%AD%90%E5%92%8C%E7%99%BE%E8%8D%89%E5%91%B3-a8606c20.md"
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citation: "小军. “Alibaba's Own Snack Brand: The Real Losers May Not Be Three Squirrels, Bestore, or Be & Cheery.” New Distribution, 2020-03-20. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/alibaba-s-own-snack-brand-the-real-losers-may-not-be-three-squirrels-bes-a8606c20/"
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---

# Alibaba's Own Snack Brand: The Real Losers May Not Be Three Squirrels, Bestore, or Be & Cheery

> Alibaba has quietly launched its own private-label snack brand, Bonbater (棒倍特), on Tmall Supermarket, signaling a potential shift in the online snack market. While the brand's current sales are modest, its access to platform traffic and brand endorsement could disrupt established players, though Alibaba's strategic intent likely extends beyond revenue to building a flexible supply chain and ecosystem moat.

**The referee stepping onto the field as a player, and unusually keeping a low profile, naturally sparks speculation in the industry.**
Alibaba's move into private-label snacks is exactly such an event. Recent media reports indicate that late last year, Alibaba's Tmall Supermarket launched its own leisure food brand, Bonbater (棒倍特), which has not yet been extensively promoted.
Public records show that Bonbater's distributor is Hangzhou Xinxuan E-commerce Company, which is the operator of Taobao Xinxuan (淘宝心选), Alibaba's well-known private-label curated e-commerce brand. It was launched in 2017, joining the ranks of internet companies' curated e-commerce brands like NetEase Yanxuan and Xiaomi Youpin.
According to Qichacha, the earliest legal representative of Hangzhou Xinxuan E-commerce was Jiang Fan, who was replaced in 2018 by Zhang Di (nickname: Junyuan), the current head of Taobao Xinxuan, following Alibaba's business restructuring.
**Internet snacks have been a focal point in the industry over the past two years**: After Three Squirrels went public last year, its stock price peaked at 81.5 yuan, a 4.5-fold increase from the issue price of 14.68 yuan, and its market cap is currently around 25 billion yuan. This year, Bestore went public and, amid market volatility, saw 15 consecutive limit-up days, catching up to Three Squirrels, with a market cap now reaching 23 billion yuan—nearly on par. Be & Cheery, the second-largest online player, was sold to PepsiCo for 5 billion yuan this year, but the soaring valuations of the other two giants also provide significant room for Be & Cheery's growth prospects.
**But Alibaba's entry into private-label snacks introduces a new variable: the online channel itself is the biggest source of imagination for the snack giants' market value stories.** Now that Alibaba is personally entering the fray, could it impact the current market landscape? What is the strategic aim behind Bonbater's emergence?

**-01-
Exploring Bonbater**
Before entering the public eye, Bonbater had been quietly operating on Alibaba's platform for nearly half a year.
As early as September last year, reports indicated that the National Trademark Office website showed Alibaba had applied for trademarks under multiple classes for BONBATER and 棒倍特.
Bonbater's packaging clearly states the commissioning party as Hangzhou Xinxuan E-commerce Company, further confirming the relationship between this quietly launched brand on Tmall Supermarket and Alibaba.
Currently, compared to the hundreds or thousands of SKUs of the snack giants, Bonbater has only a limited number of products on Tmall Supermarket—just over a dozen items, including egg cakes, red dates, seaweed, soybeans, cashews, and salted egg yolk fish skin. Despite the small SKU count, it already covers major snack categories such as nuts and roasted seeds, dried fruit, dried meat and jerky, and pastries and candies.
Although the official relationship with Bonbater is not emphasized, Bonbater's product links not only carry Tmall Supermarket's recommended label but also appear in Tmall Membership Store, and some items have received promotional resources from Viya, indicating some in-platform support. However, due to limited SKUs, estimated monthly sales based on Tmall's searchable sales figures are only in the millions.
In comparison, according to data from Jieshu Consulting, in February, the top two snack sellers in the primary snack market were Three Squirrels and Be & Cheery, with transaction volumes of 158 million yuan and 105 million yuan respectively, while Bestore had 66.91 million yuan. Bonbater still lags these leading companies by an order of magnitude.
Currently, **Bonbater's brand operation model is similar to NetEase Yanxuan's ODM model, with production outsourced to various factories.**
For example, Bonbater's dried meat and seaweed crisps are commissioned by Hangzhou Xinxuan E-commerce Co., Ltd. and produced by Xiamen Zhenchuang Food Co., Ltd.; another best-selling item, the thick-cut pure cake, which was promoted by Viya, is produced by Luohe Youdian Food Co., Ltd. under commission.
**According to Qichacha data, these companies have only a manufacturing relationship with Hangzhou Xinxuan, not an investment relationship.** However, the current suppliers to Bonbater likely have a long-standing partnership with Taobao Xinxuan, as the same Youdian products appear in Taobao's Xinxuan Quality Manufacturing Factory Store.
In terms of unit price, Bonbater is about half the price: the same product in the Xinxuan Quality Manufacturing Factory Store is 600g/29.9 yuan, while Bonbater's is 1kg/39.9 yuan. Whether this reflects Bonbater's cost-effective brand positioning or a promotional strategy during the brand's growth phase remains to be seen.
In previous articles, we analyzed IPO prospectus data and noted that despite rapid industry growth, due to high marketing expenses, the net profit margins of listed snack companies are not high, and they are competing through various online and offline channels and activities.
**Although Bonbater's sales are currently low, given the industry's cost structure and official endorsement, Bonbater, with its traffic and brand advantages, is not without opportunity**—after all, in February, the highest transaction volume in the primary snack market was Tmall Supermarket itself, with 360 million yuan, far exceeding the snack giants, thanks to the traffic advantage of the Tmall Supermarket entrance on the Taobao app's first screen, which ordinary stores can hardly match.
**If Bonbater, which already has platform traffic advantages and brand endorsement, truly intends to compete, the snack world could see another bloody battle.**

**-02-
Alibaba's Snack Venture: Not About Revenue**
**But stepping back to explore Alibaba's motives behind snacks, it likely has little to do with revenue or market cap.**
As mentioned earlier, after Three Squirrels and Bestore went public, the secondary market has given snack companies a relatively clear valuation: currently, Three Squirrels and Bestore have market caps around 25 billion yuan, with price-to-book ratios between 12 and 13 times.
A 25 billion yuan market cap and 30% gross margin seem less attractive compared to Alibaba's current $480 billion (approximately 3.36 trillion yuan) market cap and its advertising business's gross margin of over 60%.
In fact, Alibaba's Tmall once partnered with Intime in 2017 to pilot a snack store project called ONMINE, which opened in June 2017 at Hangzhou Zhongda Intime City. Conceptually similar to Three Squirrels' "feeding store," it had nearly 800 SKUs and focused on imported foods and niche emerging brands—but compared to the strategic importance of Three Squirrels' and Bestore's offline store expansions, this project has since faded into obscurity.
However, **from the perspective of Alibaba's new retail ecosystem in recent years, the significance of a private-label snack brand is clear: Alibaba's logic for doing private-label snacks is no different from doing curated e-commerce.**
Platforms creating their own curated or private-label brands typically have two strategic levels of significance.
**First, the strategic approach of Walmart and 7-Eleven in creating private labels is fundamentally to achieve product differentiation.** For channel brands like Walmart and 7-Eleven, in a saturated market where differentiation in store location, price, and service experience is difficult, private-label products become an important tactic to create competitive advantage.
In fact, as discussed in "Viral Formula" regarding convenience store food, in high-frequency consumption scenarios like convenience stores, using private-label products to increase product refresh rates, giving consumers a sense of novelty while cultivating anticipation, has become one of the most important strategies for the increasingly competitive convenience store channel.
At the same time, signature private-label product lines like Lawson's dessert series play a significant role in driving brand buzz and direct offline traffic.
This logic naturally applies online and can become a natural, uncontroversial "choose one of two" product.
**Another direction is the product matrix approach similar to Xiaomi Youpin.** Unlike channel brands creating private labels, Xiaomi's private-label products are essentially for "connection," with a larger Xiaomi ecosystem chain layout aimed at increasing the number of connections for AIoT. In a context where differentiation in single mobile phone products is increasingly difficult and product differences are shrinking, using ecosystem chain products to build a positive "family bucket" service raises user switching costs.
Xiaomi Youpin's logic is primarily consumer-facing, but when discussing Alibaba's ecosystem, merchants can also be included in the discussion.
Zhang Di, the head of Taobao Xinxuan, which is closely linked to Bonbater, previously led the Taobao Quality Life Center, and China Quality Manufacturing (中国质造) was one of the businesses under that center.
Launched in 2015, the China Quality Manufacturing project aimed to provide exclusive channels to support excellent self-owned brands on Taobao. In 2015, the goal was "to reach 10,000 factories and 100 billion yuan in output value"—a goal that aligns with today's Tmall's Daily Special C2M plan to transform 10,000 factories in three years, and the Tmall Genie industrial belt digital transformation plan.
Last year's New National Trend plan mentioned e-commerce industrial belts.
In a previous media interview, Zhang Di mentioned that Taobao Xinxuan's goal is **"to connect design with the market," which, on closer inspection, is an e-commerce version of "connecting everything"**: Alibaba promotes projects like Taobao Shenren IP at the front end to support and incubate native brands on the platform; at the back end, it runs Daily Special C2M and Tmall Genie industrial belts to lock in supply chain companies, and platforms like Pinduoduo that also promote C2M concepts directly connect to supply chain capacity, then link it to the native brands it supports or incubates, or directly to its own brands like Bonbater.
Under this logic, doing snacks is just one vertical segment under the private-label brand strategy, transferring the cooperation logic from light manufacturing factories (like small appliances) to food processing and manufacturing; further, it can connect to origin places, starting from raw material supply, doing agricultural product processing and upward distribution, connecting to processors, and ultimately selling directly through private labels.
In simple terms, **once an opportunity is identified, the platform gains greater initiative over potentially viral categories, independently exploring "samples," with private labels being just the final outlet.**
**In this entire chain, Alibaba, with its largest e-commerce data advantage, can use the private-label outlet to reverse-engineer a flexible production supply chain, thereby connecting upstream and downstream enterprises and building its own moat.**
Compared to building a snack brand with a market cap of tens of billions, such a naturally owned moat is the true strategic endgame worth investing in and exploring.

Source: Viral Formula (ID: baokuanfaze) Author: Xiaojun
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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 小军
- Published: 2020-03-20
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/alibaba-s-own-snack-brand-the-real-losers-may-not-be-three-squirrels-bes-a8606c20/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/i5e4kuXoXSK7Thge1790Ag

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