In the era of shrinking volume, where competition for existing market share intensifies and traffic dividends fade, how can brands find growth breakthroughs? Knorr, as a classic representative of the condiment category, has demonstrated strong omnichannel growth momentum in recent years. How has it found new growth solutions in the shrinking era by reconstructing the logic of 'people, goods, and places'? On August 19, at the main forum of the 7th China FMCG Conference held in Shanghai, Hu Lerong, National Retail Sales Director of Unilever Knorr, delivered a keynote speech titled 'Deep Transformation of People, Goods, and Places: Revitalizing Classic Condiment Brands with New Offline Growth Momentum,' sharing Knorr's deep transformations in channels, products, marketing, and organization, providing new ideas for brand development. New Distribution (新经销) reports on the highlights of his speech for our readers.

Rooted in Foodservice, Breaking Through in Retail In the traditional and highly competitive condiment market, Knorr, as a core brand under Unilever, has maintained a low-key, pragmatic, yet continuously growing development posture. Born in Europe with over a century of history, Knorr has not only become a leading condiment supplier to China's foodservice industry over decades in the Chinese market but has also established itself as one of the world's largest and most influential condiment brands, with products sold in over 100 countries. Unlike most condiment brands that start in retail, Knorr's starting point is in foodservice, which is also its greatest differentiating advantage. Leveraging Unilever's global resources and local deep-dive capabilities, Knorr has assembled a professional team of over 100 five-star executive chefs in China, dedicated to product development, flavor insight, inspiration solutions, live streaming, and offline terminal displays. These five-star chefs are also the backbone of China's Olympic culinary team, with 80% of the Chinese national culinary team members coming from Unilever Knorr's five-star chef team. In 2016 and 2020, they represented the country twice, winning gold and silver medals and bringing honor to the nation. It is precisely because of this deep 'foodservice DNA' that Knorr was able to rapidly expand into the retail track during the pandemic. Since 2020, Knorr has brought its B-end professional capabilities to C-end consumer scenarios, accelerating its entry into the retail market. In retail channels, Knorr has proactively embraced emerging channels such as instant retail, interest e-commerce, and new retail. It has performed strongly on interest e-commerce platforms like Douyin, with multiple categories ranking at the top of Douyin subcategories, quickly achieving a breakthrough from 0 to 1. While growing online, Knorr has also actively expanded its offline business. Starting in April this year, Knorr conducted a deep reform of its offline retail end, expecting to achieve growth of over 20% in the remaining three quarters of the year. In the current context of overall pressure on the condiment industry, this growth rate far exceeds the industry average. At the same time, Knorr has continued to increase investment in its supply chain. The Tianjin food factory was awarded 'Lighthouse Factory'—the highest certification and honor in the world's food factories—and on August 15, 2025, a new logistics park and production base was launched in Conghua, Guangzhou. This is Unilever's largest single investment in China in a decade, signaling Unilever's continued optimism and firm commitment to China's condiment sector. It can be said that Knorr, with its solid brand foundation, is steadily carving out a new path for brand re-growth in today's highly fragmented environment.

Dual Reconstruction of Channels and Marketing Driving Qualitative Change in Offline Growth This year, Knorr has continued to intensify its efforts in the retail end. It has comprehensively upgraded its channels and marketing, striving to activate offline business and achieve a qualitative leap through more precise layout and services closer to consumers. At the channel level, Knorr has implemented three key initiatives:

  1. Comprehensive reform of the distribution model In regions with strong brand presence such as Guangdong, Knorr has upgraded its distributor profile, selecting high-quality customers who can penetrate terminals and engage in long-term cooperation, thereby achieving intensive cultivation in local markets. In emerging provinces where the brand is growing rapidly, Knorr has integrated and focused resources to increase the business scale of core distributors, promote channel concentration, help distributors improve market penetration capabilities, and enhance regional coverage efficiency. At the same time, Knorr has fundamentally reformed its trade terms with distributors. It has abandoned the common practice of stocking pressure, no longer assessing distributors based on purchases. All incentives and policies are centered around distributor sell-through and the number of active SKUs at store terminals. This means that Knorr drives sustainable growth for distributors by serving more quality stores, penetrating more best-selling products, and enabling terminal stores to generate better output, rather than relying on traditional channel stuffing or stocking pressure to achieve short-term performance.
  2. Integrated services for chain customers In managing chain customers, Knorr has also broken the original single-customer-manager service model. Instead, multiple teams—including customer managers, marketing, culinary services, and distributors—collaborate to provide top retailers with suitable product portfolios and customized marketing solutions, enhancing service to key accounts.
  3. Smart tools for efficiency In digitalization, Knorr actively embraces market changes, partnering with several leading data platforms. It has opened up digital tools such as a distributor management digital platform and store heat maps, creating a complete channel digitalization system. Although this is just the beginning of Knorr's digitalization journey, in the coming years, Knorr will continue to invest persistently, leading the digitalization development of the traditional condiment industry. On the marketing front, Knorr emphasizes the deep integration of condiments with fresh food scenarios. Through joint displays in the fresh food section and cross-category super brand alliances for scenario marketing, it better interprets Knorr's value proposition of turning ingredients into delicious dishes on family dining tables. At the same time, integrating the traditional Chinese dietary concept of 'eating according to the seasons,' Knorr creates marketing content around solar terms, ingredients, and festivals, closely connecting with consumers' lives and enhancing emotional interaction between the brand and consumers. In terms of online-offline integration, Knorr continues to expand boundaries, linking social platform content seeding with in-store purchase experiences, helping terminals increase foot traffic, conversion rates, and the 'hustle and bustle' of stores. The comprehensive upgrade of channels and marketing provides opportunities for offline growth and brings the brand closer to consumers. However, what truly keeps Knorr competitive and indispensable to consumers is still its products.

Dual Drive of Products and Organization Building a Retail Moat In product innovation, Knorr has unique competitive advantages. With direct coverage of millions of restaurants nationwide and the accumulation of diner and consumer data behind them, Knorr can accurately grasp diners' taste trends and transfer validated culinary flavor trends from the foodservice end to retail product development in the first place, predicting new opportunities in the retail market. Hu Lerong stated that what consumers most want to replicate at home are the good and new flavors they taste in restaurants. But for today's consumers, who may have to balance work and childcare, cooking at home is complex and time-consuming. Knorr's approach is to turn classic flavors validated in restaurants into simple, convenient retail products, allowing everyone to easily make delicious meals. This logic was successfully validated as early as 2019. Knorr drew inspiration from its golden sour soup product in the foodservice segment and launched Sour Soup Beef in retail, becoming the first brand to launch a retail version of Sour Soup Beef. In 2025, Knorr once again used the 'foodservice feeding retail' approach to create a new bestseller—Salad Dressing Sauce. This product originated from the fresh sauce product created by Knorr's foodservice division. After optimizing the formula and simplifying the operation, the product achieved nearly 100 million yuan in sales within just four months of launch, becoming a major hit case in the condiment industry this year. As health trends become increasingly mainstream, consumers want to eat deliciously but also healthily. Knorr is simultaneously advancing innovations such as reduced salt, low fat, and even zero fat and zero additives, making formulas increasingly 'clean' to meet the dietary preferences of people with 'three highs' and young health-conscious dieters. It also designs packaging details ergonomically, such as spouts and measuring scales, truly achieving 'making complex cooking simple, and good taste with health.' At the organizational level, Knorr Retail has undergone a deep 'de-big-company' mechanism reshaping. Although Knorr Retail is a brand under Unilever, a Fortune 500 company, Knorr Retail defines itself as an entrepreneurial brand within a large corporation. Knorr Retail has changed its previous cumbersome operational model, implementing a regional manager/customer manager responsibility system. Each regional manager/customer manager has full authority over market resource allocation, formulating sales plans based on local market rhythms with 'one city, one strategy; one customer, one strategy,' significantly improving organizational response efficiency and market reaction speed. More critically, Knorr no longer bases business growth on 'channel-driven' but shifts the driving force to 'consumer-driven.' In the past, Knorr's business team focused on selling in and sales volume; now their responsibilities have transformed into more direct consumer-facing actions such as tasting experiences and live streaming interactions, to enhance the in-store scenario experience of Knorr products. This systematic upgrade from products to teams not only enhances Knorr's competitiveness in the retail market but also provides a new model for brand and organizational collaborative upgrading for the entire condiment industry.

Final Thoughts In today's shrinking era, Knorr firmly believes that the Chinese condiment market still has enormous space. China has a population of 1.4 billion; it's just that when we seize market growth opportunities, we need to invest more wisdom and effort than in the past. Therefore, for Knorr, in product development and channel models, it always adheres to: inherit without being conservative, innovate without forgetting the roots. In the most difficult times, maintaining resilience is important, but equally crucial is adhering to the essence of offline retail and the essence of offline business models. In summary, by developing digitalization, embracing new channels, exploring differentiation, protecting the value chain, and persisting in long-termism, business will naturally achieve sustainable development. In the future, Knorr looks forward to partnering with more partners to bring healthy, trendy, delicious, and convenient condiments into thousands of households. We welcome customers with cooperation intentions (distributors/retailers/platforms) to contact us. Key recruitment regions and channels:

  • Regions: Shanghai/Jiangsu/Zhejiang/Guangdong/Fujian/Beijing/Tianjin/Hebei/Shandong/Shaanxi/Henan
  • Channels: National instant retail, community group buying, B2B distribution channels, and special channels such as gifts/employee benefits/labor protection supplies/government and enterprise procurement/union benefits/property services/gas station systems, etc. We look forward to cooperating with you for mutual success!