---
title: "Cainiao Integrates 1,500 Mengniu Distributors, Covering 300 Cities, with Nationwide Unified Inventory!"
description: "Consumers order on their phones, and the brand delivers from the same-city distributor's warehouse, achieving half-day delivery. This is the new retail model being piloted by Mengniu and Cainiao Supply Chain. According to New Distribution, starting February 1, Mengniu launched a marketing campaign with Alipay's 'Collect Five Blessings,' where consumers scan the Mengniu logo to collect blessings and get coupons to buy milk. As Mengniu's supply chain service provider, Cainiao activated a customized plan, shipping from over 1,500 core distributors across China to ensure half-day delivery. Currently, the campaign is expected to give away millions of boxes of milk."
author: "秦淮"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-02-23"
language: "en"
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# Cainiao Integrates 1,500 Mengniu Distributors, Covering 300 Cities, with Nationwide Unified Inventory!

> Consumers order on their phones, and the brand delivers from the same-city distributor's warehouse, achieving half-day delivery. This is the new retail model being piloted by Mengniu and Cainiao Supply Chain. According to New Distribution, starting February 1, Mengniu launched a marketing campaign with Alipay's 'Collect Five Blessings,' where consumers scan the Mengniu logo to collect blessings and get coupons to buy milk. As Mengniu's supply chain service provider, Cainiao activated a customized plan, shipping from over 1,500 core distributors across China to ensure half-day delivery. Currently, the campaign is expected to give away millions of boxes of milk.

Consumers order on their phones, and the brand delivers directly from the same-city distributor's warehouse, achieving half-day delivery. This is the new retail model being piloted by Mengniu and Cainiao Supply Chain.
According to New Distribution, starting February 1, Mengniu launched a marketing campaign with Alipay's 'Collect Five Blessings.' Consumers scanning the Mengniu logo can not only collect blessings but also receive coupons to buy milk. As Mengniu's supply chain service provider, Cainiao activated a customized plan, shipping from over 1,500 core distributors across China to ensure half-day delivery. Currently, the campaign is expected to give away millions of boxes of milk.
Beneath the marketing campaign lies a disruptive innovation in new retail supply chain by Mengniu and Cainiao. For many FMCG brands, online inventory typically accounts for only 20-30% of total inventory, while offline accounts for 70-80%. **Mengniu and Cainiao's collaboration is the first in the industry to digitize offline distributor inventory, achieving nationwide unified inventory, making the new supply chain a powerful tool for new retail.**
**-01-** **Mengniu Joins 'Collect Five Blessings,' Pioneering New Retail Delivery Model with Cainiao**
After years of user cultivation, Alipay's 'Collect Five Blessings' has become a nationwide online New Year tradition during the Lunar New Year. Over six years, cumulative participants have exceeded 700 million, meaning one in two Chinese has participated.
During the Year of the Ox Spring Festival, 'Collect Five Blessings' opened commercial cooperation, becoming a new retail marketing scenario where merchants compete for users and drive sales. Alongside brands like Didi, FAW-Volkswagen, Intime Department Store, KFC, McDonald's, Joy City, Aegean, Galaxy, and Sasasea Outlets, Mengniu is one of the merchants that secured the massive online traffic from scanning for blessings.
(Mengniu's Pure Zhen and Telunsu logos also entered Alipay's official AR scan blessing image collection)
'Scanning the Mengniu logo to collect blessings this year, I was the first to try it,' said Ms. Chang from Shuozhou, Shanxi, a veteran player of Collect Five Blessings. On the morning of February 1, she scanned the logo to try the new feature and immediately redeemed a coupon to buy Mengniu milk.
However, she worried that as the New Year approached, express delivery might stop or slow down. To her surprise, within 6 hours of scanning the logo and placing the order, the milk arrived, faster than usual purchases from flagship stores.
The reason for faster delivery than typical online shopping is the 'special shortcut': Mengniu does not ship from e-commerce warehouses like ordinary online purchases, but from same-city distributor warehouses.
Specifically, after users place orders with coupons, Cainiao's intelligent system matches orders by address, automatically assigning them to the nearest Mengniu distributor. The distributor prints the label, packages, and sends it to a nearby express sorting center (e.g., STO Express) for same-city delivery.
'This is much faster than shipping from e-commerce warehouses. On the first day, the fastest order took only 6 hours,' said the project lead at Mengniu. Distributors receive information in 4 minutes, pick, pack, and deliver to the express station in 4 hours, and the courier delivers within 2 hours.
Cainiao also developed a lightweight ERP system for this campaign, integrating order management and warehouse management functions, matching orders to the nearest distributor for same-city delivery within half a day.
This delivery chain differs from both the B2C e-commerce chain and the B2b offline chain.
It is understood that since February 1, **Cainiao has integrated over 1,500 core Mengniu distributors, covering nearly 3,000 districts and counties across more than 300 cities, and has shipped millions of boxes of milk. Cainiao provides comprehensive support in logistics, supply chain, product, technology, operations, and finance.**
What truly attracts New Distribution is the disruptive innovation in Mengniu's offline supply chain, driven by Mengniu and Cainiao behind this new retail marketing.
**-02-** **Incompatibility Between Online and Offline Inventory: A Long-Standing Pain Point for Brands**
Let's start with a common industry phenomenon, also a long-standing supply chain pain point for brands.
FMCG products, due to their immediate consumption nature, saw 99% of sales from offline before e-commerce, distributed through local distributors and offline retail stores. With the rise of e-commerce, online channels have gradually become mainstream.
Thus, most FMCG brands now have two logistics supply chain networks: the B network, which moves goods from factories to small b distributor warehouses nationwide (B2b), and the C network, where brands or agents open online stores on e-commerce platforms, each handling online orders and shipping to C-end consumers from their own e-commerce warehouses (B2C).
Currently, these two networks operate almost independently with no intersection. Whether in internal organizational structure or external distributors and warehousing, they seem to exist in parallel worlds.
This isolation may seem harmless, but it causes significant waste in operations.
For example, during Double 11, brand flagship stores on Tmall see sales surge, with goods shipped from e-commerce warehouses, typically 200-500 kilometers away, taking one to two days to reach consumers.
However, within 30 kilometers, in the same-city distributor's warehouse, there are tens of thousands of boxes of identical inventory.
Since it's the **same brand and same product, why go far when near? Because the two networks are not interconnected.**
This is the main pain point in the industry. Moreover, beyond the ineffective linkage between C and B networks, the same SKU during promotions often leads to price conflicts between online and offline.
To prevent price chaos from 'cross-regional sales,' brands must differentiate products, specifications, and packaging between online and offline, causing huge costs in production, consumer perception, and internal coordination. **As daily necessities, FMCG products are often low-value, bulky, and heavy. Warehousing and logistics handling constitute a significant portion of operating costs.**
Cainiao and Mengniu's attempt effectively addresses these pain points. With Cainiao's coordination, Mengniu's nationwide distributors have 'cloud-based inventory integration and unified inventory,' enabling same-city delivery upon consumer orders.
Previously, large-scale online interactions often required managing relationships between online sales channels and vast offline distributor networks. If purely online shipping, offline distributors miss out on sales boosts; if offline shipping, challenges like cross-region management and preventing cross-regional sales arise.
Additionally, there's a bigger challenge: if a consumer buys milk from Tmall flagship store, it should ship from the store's warehouse, but instead ships from a nearby offline distributor. While this shortens delivery routes and saves logistics costs, it raises settlement issues between the online flagship store and offline distributors. Mishandling could disrupt existing channel systems and confuse distributors.
These difficulties have deterred many merchants from new retail innovation.
Mengniu and Cainiao's innovation simply digitizes offline distributor inventory, avoiding conflicts between e-commerce and offline channels, not harming distributor interests, and even helping clear distributor inventory. It maintains the brand's vast offline distributor system while achieving 'traffic integration, inventory integration, and data integration' across the merchant-distributor system, with 1,500 distributors nationwide operating as one inventory and delivering locally.
Conflicts resolved, sales increased, costs reduced, efficiency improved. This multi-win new retail supply chain innovation sets a benchmark for the FMCG industry.
**-03-** **Seizing New Retail: Building a Cross-Platform, Omnichannel Digital Supply Chain System**
Having discussed industry pain points, let's look at industry evolution trends.
Today, almost all brand owners gradually feel two things:
**First, consumers' pursuit of a better life, with diversified and personalized needs.** Especially the increase in emotional and functional demands, requiring brands to develop and produce more 'small but beautiful' products to meet fragmented and differentiated needs.
**Second, the diversification of retail scenarios.** Previously, there were only three or four main channels, but now more retail scenarios emerge, such as O2O home delivery, community group buying, social e-commerce, and especially live-streaming e-commerce like Taobao Live, Douyin, and Kuaishou.
Massive product demand and diverse retail scenario coverage are definite trends, posing significant challenges to brands' online and offline supply chain management capabilities.
In the past, when these trends were less obvious, brands often patched things up reactively. Today they set up a new retail department, tomorrow a new position. But these seem like Windows system patches, adding a patch for each new channel.
Therefore, as new retail innovation enters deep waters, with increasingly diverse consumer demands and retail channels, brands must think from the ground up, as New Distribution has always emphasized.
Key elements include:
**1. Precision marketing:** Provide consumers with segmented products and services for different needs.
**2. Ubiquity:** Achieve integrated online-offline coordination, efficient reach, and easy access for consumers.
**3. Supply chain digitization:** One-stop B2C fast delivery, digitized omnichannel and multi-platform logistics, and unified online-offline inventory.
Developing and producing good products and covering multiple channels require upgrading the currently fragmented channel systems into a cross-platform, omnichannel digital supply chain as the core foundation.
Build a unified, consumer-centric omnichannel supply chain online and offline, using data for management, achieving digital integration of product logistics, capital flow, and information flow across platforms and the entire chain.
Previously, brand business was split into online and offline, with completely different supply chain management. Online e-commerce naturally digitizes orders, inventory, and logistics, making management easier. Offline, however, faces hundreds or thousands of distributors, making it hard to manage overall inventory accurately.
Taking Mengniu and Cainiao's cooperation as an example, it is the first in the FMCG industry to integrate nationwide distributor inventory into the cloud, achieving unified inventory management, allowing the brand to monitor real-time inventory of every item. This model can be used for marketing campaigns like 'Collect Five Blessings' and daily marketing like live-streaming on Taobao, Douyin, and Kuaishou.
(On September 7, 2017, Mengniu and Alibaba launched comprehensive strategic cooperation in new retail and logistics, including reshaping supply chain with Cainiao, reducing Mengniu's online logistics costs by 40%)
**The data integration between distributors and consumers also lays a solid foundation for brands and distributors to deeply operate and serve consumers,** helping them seize various new retail opportunities.
Tips adopted will be paid 400-2000 yuan.


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