---
title: "Bridging the Last Mile for Food Distributors: Small Food Businesses Have Great Potential!"
description: "With minimal cost and maximum efficiency, every product should reach its intended destination. Today, food distributors face immense challenges, including funding constraints and lack of brand awareness. WeBank's WeBank Enterprise+ offers financial and non-financial services to help small food businesses overcome these hurdles and thrive."
author: "陈文石"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-12-29"
language: "en"
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# Bridging the Last Mile for Food Distributors: Small Food Businesses Have Great Potential!

> With minimal cost and maximum efficiency, every product should reach its intended destination. Today, food distributors face immense challenges, including funding constraints and lack of brand awareness. WeBank's WeBank Enterprise+ offers financial and non-financial services to help small food businesses overcome these hurdles and thrive.

**Introduction: With minimal cost and maximum efficiency, let every product reach where it should go.**
Today, every food distributor has given their all.
In fact, since 2014, the operating environment for distributors has become increasingly difficult. Competition is intensifying, operating costs are rising year by year, and profit margins continue to decline.
Large teams, substantial turnover, but low profits—this is the reality for most distributors. Coupled with the huge uncertainty of the three-year pandemic, the operational pressure and risks for distributors have greatly increased.

**The Huge Challenges Facing a Million Food Distributors**
Today, more than 80% of food still relies on distributors to reach millions of terminals. In the food distribution network, distributors remain the most important network and the aorta of China's food circulation industry. The food industry's prosperity owes much to millions of distributors, but they now face significant new challenges.

**1) Funding is the most painful and difficult issue.**
The funding problems of food distributors are very tricky under the traditional financial service system. In the past, distributors mainly relied on their own funds and loans to support company growth, but generally, they couldn't scale up. Today, competition is fiercer; without scale, there is no competitiveness or survival ability. To expand scale, funding becomes a fundamental issue. Capable distributors, if funding lags, cannot restock in time, sales stagnate, and they struggle to grow. Even if they grow, funding needs change, and funding remains a bottleneck. The funding issue is like a rope around the neck of distributors' survival and development.

**2) Most distributors lack brand awareness and exposure opportunities.**
"The brand belongs to the manufacturer; I'm just selling goods." This "keep a low profile" mindset is deeply ingrained and is the business creed of most distributors. In fact, besides the brands they represent, distributors' companies and owners themselves also have brands. This brand represents quality and trust. Only by winning the trust of upstream brand owners, downstream distributors, and consumers can distributors have voice and influence with their upstream and downstream partners. But most distributors do not have a strong sense of company or personal brand. Their companies lack brand and influence; currently, they only have some customer relationships with downstream clients, and these are often held by salespeople. Meanwhile, all influence distributors have on the market comes almost entirely from brand owners. Brand managers who hold "life-and-death power"—won't they take advantage of their distributors? There have been many cases where a distributor loses the agency for a well-known brand and business drops by more than half. No business can close without trust. Brand is word-of-mouth and the greatest trust in unfamiliar relationships. Therefore, distributors must build their own company brand and even entrepreneur IP.

**Funding and brand-building are the two biggest "roadblocks" on the path to transformation and upgrading for food distributors.**

**Distributors Need Reliable Partners for Transformation and Upgrading**
The new era requires new-type distributors. On the road to transformation, traditional distributors need reliable partners. For example, everyone knows distributors have difficulty getting loans, but why has it been hard to solve? Because distributors' funding needs are very unique, making traditional bank loan systems inadequate.

**First, high flexibility is required.** Food business has obvious peak and off-peak seasons, plus low margins and high labor costs, so loan flexibility must be extremely high, ideally with drawdown and repayment at will.

**Second, unsecured or movable property collateral is required.** Distributors' business is trade and circulation; their biggest asset is the constantly circulating goods. With low margins and high labor costs, to make money, distributors must expand scale, which increases funding needs. Without collateral, they still need credit lines of millions or more. Under traditional risk assessment systems, this is hard to pass.

Is there a financial service that meets the unique funding needs of food distributors? Yes! According to New Distribution, **in 2017, WeBank launched China's first online unsecured working capital loan product for enterprises—WeBank Enterprise Loan (微业贷)**, which bridged the "last mile" of financing difficulties for small and micro enterprises, effectively lowering the threshold for them to access financing services, allowing more small businesses to obtain high-quality, efficient online financial services anytime, anywhere. It is understood that **"WeBank Enterprise Loan"** launched a differentiated **"supply chain finance"** service in 2018, catering to the financing needs of distributors and suppliers in industrial and supply chains. It can almost simultaneously **meet distributors' needs for loan flexibility and no collateral**, making it a tailor-made solution for food distributors' funding needs. Currently, WeBank Enterprise Loan has provided digital financial support to 30 national key industrial chains, partnered with nearly 600 brand partners, and served nearly 200,000 distributors and suppliers.

After solving funding issues, distributors also face **company branding, more business opportunities, and brand communication** challenges. Therefore, to comprehensively support small and micro enterprises, WeBank launched the **corporate financial brand WeBank Enterprise+ (微众企业+)**, dedicated to building a full-chain business service ecosystem, providing more comprehensive, effective, and thoughtful financial and non-financial services to small businesses. This is undoubtedly a "timely help" for food distributors in urgent need of branding.

**WeBank Enterprise+ Boosts Food Distributor Transformation, Creating a Financial Service Model**
When customers have new needs, two questions usually need answering: Should we do it? Can we do it? Companies that put "Can we do it?" first are self-centered, caring more about their own input-output ratio. Companies that put "Should we do it?" first are customer-centered, caring more about customers' fate. After solving the funding needs of small businesses, WeBank Enterprise+ discovered their need to "build brands," and its choice was "should do." To help more small businesses better voice their stories and gain more business opportunities, WeBank Enterprise+ specially created the **"Enterprise+ Stories" (《企业+故事》)** special column. Data shows: In 2022, WeBank Enterprise+ helped 63 small business owners produce story promotional videos and distributed them through multiple channels, with cumulative views exceeding 100 million by December.

Image source: Opening ceremony of the "Enterprise+ Stories: Food Industry Special" video column

In addition, WeBank Enterprise+ specifically focuses on small food businesses, creating a **year-round marketing "food" assistance plan**, mobilizing multiple parties to give voice to dozens of "food entrepreneurs," bringing over 47 million exposures. Among them, the "Enterprise+ Stories: Food Industry Special" column invited eight "food entrepreneurs" to present the arduous journey of China's food industry development through exclusive corporate growth stories, showcasing their uplifting spirit while amplifying corporate value and helping effective publicity. For example, Jinan Yuesheng Food is a customer of WeBank Enterprise+, a distributor established in 2010 focusing on frozen food, mainly representing brands like Anjoy.

Image source: First episode of "Enterprise+ Stories: Food Industry Special"

WeBank Enterprise+'s report on Yuesheng Food—"From 0 to 350 Million in Annual Sales: How He Led Small Vendors to Become 'Million-Dollar Distributors'"—attracted considerable attention in the industry. The report vividly and comprehensively reviewed Yuesheng Food's 12 years of arduous entrepreneurial journey, and through the review, elaborated its business philosophy of "win-win with brands, win-win with customers, win-win with employees." After the report was published, Yuesheng Food received greater attention and recognition from upstream enterprises and downstream partners.

Not just media reports, WeBank Enterprise+ **fully integrates food industry resources, inviting food entrepreneurs to speak at top summits, putting entrepreneurs on industry authority magazine covers, and conducting headline interviews**, helping food entrepreneurs establish corporate image, amplify corporate value, and bring more business opportunities. In August this year, Yuesheng Food was invited by WeBank Enterprise+ to participate in the "2022 China Pre-made Dishes Industry G30 Summit and 2022 China Pre-made Dishes (Meat) Industry Expo," and received the honor of "China Frozen Food Channel Top 100." At the same time, the first episode of "Enterprise+ Stories: Food Industry Special" filmed for Yuesheng Food was shown on the big screen at the summit, becoming the focus of attention.

Image source: WeBank Enterprise+

There are many other food distributors like Yuesheng Food that have benefited from WeBank Enterprise+'s support in entrepreneur IP building and corporate brand communication.

**Comprehensive "Financial + Non-Financial" Services Help Small Businesses Achieve Great Things**
From single financial services to comprehensive "financial + non-financial" services, what WeBank Enterprise+ does for distributors may seem small, but it has great demonstrative significance for China's food industry as a whole.

Image source: WeBank Enterprise+

Not only serving the distributor community, according to its plan, WeBank Enterprise+ will also leverage its platform traffic advantages and social influence to help upgrade the food industry chain at more levels, promoting high-quality development of the food industry. For example, it will create efficient two-way links between brands and distributors, and provide free electronic business cards and micro-websites for brands and distributors.

"Commercial flow, information flow, capital flow, and logistics" are the key "four flows" in food circulation. Once "information flow and capital flow" achieve seamless connection and efficient operation, first, it can greatly reduce information and capital costs in circulation; second, it can empower "commercial flow and logistics," minimizing ineffective commercial flow and logistics. Once this long-term plan of WeBank Enterprise+ is realized, China's food industry may achieve the best operating scenario: with minimal cost and maximum efficiency, let every product reach where it should go.

Today, China's food industry is in the stage of digitalization, branding, and high-quality upgrading, and the success of China's distributor community determines the success of China's circulation industry upgrade. It is hoped that every Chinese food distributor on the road to transformation can have a loyal partner like WeBank Enterprise+ to go all the way.


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