---
title: "FMCG Industry: Big Hit Products Increasingly Hard to Create"
description: "Since the beginning of the year, distributors report that despite visiting trade shows and markets, few promising new products have emerged, while private label products from retail systems are taking away business. The market seems to have lost its innovative edge, making it increasingly difficult to create blockbuster products. This is a natural stage of market development, where the threshold and requirements for creating big hits are much higher, demanding comprehensive capabilities ten times greater than before."
author: "张振宇"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2026-06-08"
language: "en"
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# FMCG Industry: Big Hit Products Increasingly Hard to Create

> Since the beginning of the year, distributors report that despite visiting trade shows and markets, few promising new products have emerged, while private label products from retail systems are taking away business. The market seems to have lost its innovative edge, making it increasingly difficult to create blockbuster products. This is a natural stage of market development, where the threshold and requirements for creating big hits are much higher, demanding comprehensive capabilities ten times greater than before.

"Since the beginning of the year, I've visited the Spring Sugar Fair and toured the market, but I haven't seen any particularly promising new products. Instead, after the retail system I serve planned its private label products, part of my business was taken away..."
Recently, while visiting distributors, I've heard similar feedback quite often.
A few years ago, the market still saw hot new products like sugar-free tea and vegetarian tripe. But after 2025, the market seems to have suddenly lost its innovative ability and become even more competitive.
Both brands and distributors have to accept a harsh reality: **it is increasingly difficult for big hit products to emerge in the market.**
More precisely, in the current FMCG market environment, **the threshold and requirements for creating a big hit product are getting higher and higher. Besides luck, the comprehensive capabilities required may be ten times what they were in the past.**
**An inevitable law of market development at a certain stage:**
**The probability of creating a big hit product is greatly reduced**
First, let's talk about an objective fact that many practitioners overlook.
Looking back at the European and American FMCG markets, we can clearly see: **when the FMCG market develops to a certain stage, it will flourish and produce many big hit products (even super hits), but after a period of prosperity, the probability of creating big hits will inevitably decrease.**
Take the U.S. market as an example. Whether it's carbonated drinks, puffed snacks, candies, cookies, or other categories, the globally recognized super hits we know today basically emerged and grew during a specific period.
For example, Oreo and Lay's: the growth of these American big hits was concentrated between 1950 and 1990.
Regardless of when these products were born, even if they were as early as Coca-Cola in 1886 and Pepsi in 1898, the time window for them to truly develop into super hits basically fell between 1950 and 1990.
There are multiple influencing factors. **But to a large extent, this phenomenon benefited from the prosperity and industrialization of the American market after World War II.**
Of course, after the 1990s, there were also very successful FMCG big hits in the United States, such as Monster in the energy drink category dominated by Red Bull, and Chobani in the Greek yogurt segment competing with Dannon and Yoplait...
**But such success stories have become rare.**
Monster and Chobani's big hit product lines
Turning to the current domestic market, it is likely experiencing a similar shift in the stage of FMCG market development.
From the 1990s to recent years, although media and retail channels have changed, the entire FMCG market has been in a stage where supply was less than demand.
**During this period of narrowing supply-demand gap, the diversification of supply provided opportunities for many categories to become branded.**
This is why we see many national brands, such as Wahaha, Master Kong, Uni-President, Nongfu Spring, Weilong, and Qiaqia, emerging during this period.
The new environmental structure mentioned at the 11th Fast Moving Consumer Goods Conference
But now it's completely different. **The FMCG market has entered an era of surplus, where supply clearly exceeds demand and is squeezing, and the demand side is also showing obvious structural differentiation.**
It is already difficult to identify and seize good opportunities in differentiated demand, and to cope with the involution competition on the supply side, the difficulty for brands to create big hits has greatly increased.
**The path and methodology for brands to create big hits have also completely changed**
But the increased difficulty in creating big hits **is not only due to changes in the external competitive environment; more importantly, the path model for creating big hits has also undergone tremendous changes.**
In the past, FMCG companies launched good products, validated them in a certain channel, then entered benchmark large channels to build product momentum, and then expanded nationwide through distributor recruitment and coverage.
The key trilogy of "product, channel, brand" provided a relatively unified path for the birth of big hits.
**The essence is that in the stage of supply less than demand, the initiative for developing big hits was more on the supply side (brands), and relatively controllable.**
But in the era of surplus, this path has almost completely failed because several core elements of the market have clearly changed.
First, there is structural differentiation in demand. **Consumers no longer pursue the same things,** which means it is difficult to have a unified product to cover consumers from different circles.
Even if a product has cost-performance advantages, whether consumers value quality or price more can lead to significant differences in perception and demand.
The consumer population shows an M-shaped structure, with different groups having different consumption needs
This is why retail changes in recent years have also shown a pattern of ice and fire: on one hand, discount channels representing extreme cheapness are developing rapidly; on the other hand, membership supermarkets representing quality life are expanding.
**It is almost impossible for a product to effectively cover both types of channels at the same time, which is a huge challenge for FMCG companies.**
Second, in the era of surplus, **the initiative for developing big hits has also shifted. To some extent, brands have lost their voice in product development to channels, especially high-momentum channels.**
This shift in voice is almost irreversible.
When consumers develop repurchase loyalty to a channel, even if FMCG companies develop relatively good-selling new products, **the channel, with its data and shelf space, can completely replace the brand with its own private label products if necessary.**
This has been common in the past few years. Unless the brand has supply chain advantages to seize OEM opportunities, it will directly lose business opportunities.
But even so, OEM products do not help much with brand building or creating big hits.
**When more and more brands become the supply chain for channels, channels begin to master the ability to define products. As capabilities accumulate, channels start to lead product innovation.**
Take the most intuitive contrast: at this year's Spring Sugar Fair, no matter how many exhibitors there were, few hit products appeared; instead, Sam's Club, Pangdonglai, and even Hema occasionally produce phenomenal single products that the market imitates.
In this situation, **for brands, if they do not rely on channel insights and innovation for co-creation,** it is extremely difficult to independently promote a big hit.
But to learn how to co-create big hits with channels, there is much knowledge that brands need to re-explore. They can no longer rely on past techniques, and even past successful experiences can become obstacles.
Undoubtedly, this poses a higher difficulty and new challenge for brands' comprehensive capabilities.
## **Final Thoughts**
Objectively speaking, the increasing difficulty in creating big hits is also a signal that the current domestic FMCG market has developed to a fairly mature stage.
But in this relatively mature FMCG market, brands face a clear choice: how to master new capabilities and methodologies to create big hits in the era of surplus and achieve sustained qualitative growth? Or to extend existing big hits and maintain their own market share?
**There is no right or wrong choice, but for brands, they all need to accept the new normal of the market in the era of surplus.**


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