In 2020, the beverage industry saw slow overall growth, with some sub-sectors even declining. As many have lamented, the pandemic indeed affected consumer spending. But blaming "poor beverage sales" entirely on the pandemic seems unreasonable. We must ask ourselves: if the pandemic hadn't occurred, would beverages have sold well? China's beverage market has developed for over 40 years. Taking tea drinks as an example, from Xurisheng pioneering the tea beverage market to Uni-President and Master Kong dominating, the existing market has long been saturated. If companies haven't realized that creating new categories that meet consumer needs is the only way out, then your "poor sales" are inevitable. Let's take Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea, which generated nearly 1 billion yuan in sales within its first year, as an example to analyze how to open new growth tracks in a saturated market by creating new sub-categories. -01- Creating a New Juice Tea Category: Establishing Industry Standards is Key As the saying goes, "No break, no make." Before Meco Honey Valley broke into the traditional tea beverage market, it faced a critical point that was both a problem and an opportunity: · The tea beverage industry has diverse categories with low recognition In the traditional tea beverage market, most products primarily use sugar, instant tea powder, citric acid, flavors, and pigments—often in the form of additive blending. This has led to a situation where, without stringent requirements for raw materials and production processes, the entry barrier for the tea beverage industry has been lowered significantly. While this has allowed rapid development, stagnation in production technology and product innovation soon caps the industry's growth. In 2015, the innovation of the "fruit + tea" flavored tea category made fruit-flavored tea a major choice in consumers' daily lives. However, the word "fruit-flavored" still hides industry information unknown to consumers. According to relevant industry standards, products in the "fruit + tea" category with juice content below 5% can only be called flavored tea beverages, i.e., "fruit-flavored tea"; only those with juice content ≥5% are allowed to use the name "juice tea." In 2018, Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea, with its ≥10% juice content, created the "juice tea" category, winning from the start and achieving nearly 1 billion yuan in sales in less than a year. This year, Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea has upgraded its juice content to ≥25%, five times the national standard, currently the industry's upper limit. Combined with freshly brewed tea extract, it truly restores the original taste of "juice tea." Real tea and real juice, 0 fat, 0 added colors, allowing consumers to directly perceive the health and quality of Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea. It is precisely Meco Honey Valley's insistence on "real ingredients" that has elevated it from category creator to leader. -02- Why Can Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea Win the Hearts of Young People? So what exactly did Meco Honey Valley do right to gain acceptance and recognition from discerning young people, making them hold Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea in their hands? 1. Visible Reason: Combining Fashion and Price to Engage Young People The importance of the young demographic to FMCG products needs no emphasis, as they are the ones who have turned the "appearance revolution" into the norm. Packaging, as the first point of contact with young consumers, requires fashionable and eye-catching design. Beyond catching the fashion design, Meco Honey Valley captured a more critical point: the packaging form of Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea—the cup shape. When seeing the product itself, people tend to overlook its cup-shaped packaging, as if it naturally should be cup-shaped. Few deeply consider why it's cup-shaped rather than something else. Generally, in the FMCG industry, the most common method for category innovation is to use packaging design to create new consumer perceptions and associations, thereby influencing behavior. Thus, most FMCG brands treat packaging as a strategic starting point. Before Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea, cup-shaped packaging was most widely used by street-side freshly made beverages like Heytea and Starbucks. So when cup-shaped packaging appears, consumers first associate it with freshly made drinks, leading to two other associations: · The taste and flavor of freshly made drinks. · The price of freshly made drinks. One key reason freshly made drinks are popular is the freshness of ingredients, which guarantees taste and quality. Therefore, it's reasonable that the highest price for freshly made drinks can reach 30+ yuan and still be accepted by young consumers. From these associations, young consumers perceive freshly made drinks as high-end and expensive. Thus, an opportunity emerged for Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea: the cup-shaped packaging evokes associations with freshly made drinks, but the price is set at 5-8 yuan, giving consumers the overall perception of "high-end but not expensive." High-end but not expensive—this hits the sweet spot of young consumers' demands. At the same time, don't underestimate the impact of technology and equipment on the product itself. The taste of Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea depends on advanced processes and equipment—using German aseptic cold-filling equipment, which allows the product to meet long shelf-life requirements without adding preservatives. Additionally, UHT ultra-high-temperature instantaneous sterilization technology effectively kills microorganisms in a short time, reducing loss of color, flavor, and nutrients, and maximizing the preservation of the product's original flavor and quality. This brings Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea infinitely close to the taste and flavor of freshly made drinks, further raising the product barrier for the juice tea category. 2. Invisible Reason: Real Ingredients as the Foundation Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea has always advocated "real tea, real juice." Where exactly is the truth? Meco Honey Valley has a solid foundation. · Tea juice: Abandoning the tea powder used in traditional tea drinks, it adopts fresh tea leaf extraction technology to better preserve the original flavor of the tea leaves. · Juice: Traveling the world to select high-quality juices, achieving the best sweet-sour ratio to create a cup of juice tea. In fact, Meco Honey Valley does more than this, but consumers cannot see or perceive these advantages. To turn these invisible advantages into visible and perceivable ones, the ingredient list is the most direct proof. The newly emerging yogurt brand "Jane's" used a simple ingredient list—raw milk, lactic acid bacteria, nothing else—and entered the top 10 in the low-temperature dairy market within just 5 years. On the surface, we see the ingredient list, but it encapsulates supply chain management, production equipment technology, and even personnel management, ultimately becoming Jane's strategic starting point, providing clear perception to consumers and clear strategic direction to internal staff. Condensing Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea into two points: · Real tea: Oolong tea content ≥0.8% · Real juice: Juice content (as original juice) ≥25% This is the foundation of "real ingredients." Ma Wenyuan, actor of Cao Weining in "Word of Honor," recommends Meco Juice Tea -03- Why Can Juice Tea Open a "10-Billion-Yuan Track"? 1. Consumer Awareness of Juice Tea Whether it's fruit-flavored tea or juice tea, from the perspective of the entire beverage industry, both address consumers' drinking needs. Fruit-flavored tea is essentially a 1+1 result of traditional beverages "fruit-flavored drink + tea drink," adding a flavor option through taste innovation. Juice tea, on the other hand, systematically upgrades the entire production process—raw materials, production technology, packaging—abandoning blending and using real ingredients. Essentially, it addresses consumers' health needs. This means juice tea shifts the competitive focus to the battle for "health needs," elevating the competition to a higher level than fruit-flavored tea beverages. Education takes time. From milk powder to high-end milk being widely accepted took 10 years. It will also take time for people to regard juice tea as a healthy beverage. Fortunately, in the freshly made beverage industry, a considerable number of brands have already appeared in the market with the fruit tea category. Although not the same category, from the perspective of consumer demand, the scale of Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea is proportional to that of freshly made beverages. The "2019 New-Style Tea Consumption Report" also shows that among freshly made tea drinks, fruit tea sales account for 83% of new-style tea types. Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea's production and packaging processes, which guarantee taste and flavor, will be the absolute core competitiveness of the juice tea category in the future. 2. Leading the Health Demand In the "2020 National Brand Power Development Report," we can see that the feeling of health benefits and quality are the spiritual and emotional desires that Chinese consumers most crave through consumption. Health-oriented FMCG brands are also growing rapidly. For example, dairy products, which have evolved from being defined as "traditional supplements" to one of people's "daily foods," are a typical representative of China's health consumption development. It is the continuous awakening and improvement of public health awareness that has contributed to the success of two domestic dairy brands approaching 100 billion yuan in revenue. It's often said that building a brand requires following the trend. The health consumption awareness of the young generation is rising, stemming from their desire for control over their health. In the past, maintaining health relied on self-discipline, but now there are products that can replace self-discipline, satisfying taste while maintaining health, eliminating the biggest purchase concern for young consumers. Additionally, after the pandemic, the public's demand for and attention to health will reach an unprecedented peak, pushing health-oriented FMCG products to the forefront. To meet more health-oriented flavor choices, Meco Honey Valley, while upgrading the juice content to 25%, also innovatively launched Meco Honey Valley Lactic Acid Bacteria Flavored Fruit Tea, which adds imported lactic acid bacteria fermentation and dietary fiber, also deeply loved by young people. Therefore, this pandemic brings not only crises but also opportunities worth discovering. Meco Honey Valley Juice Tea, at the start of its journey into the 10-billion-yuan track, has the advantages of the right time, place, and people. Breaking through the 10-billion-yuan mark is within sight. Once the tip is adopted, a reward of 400-2000 yuan will be paid.