---
title: "Former Jia Duobao and Special Forces Coconut Juice Executives Launch Seasoning Brand—Kouwei Quan, Redefining the Seasoning 3.0 Era"
description: "As the new consumption entrepreneurship wave heats up, more executives from traditional FMCG giants are joining the startup fray. Kouwei Quan, founded by a former sales executive with over 20 years of experience, has completed two rounds of financing within three months, aiming to redefine the seasoning industry with a focus on nutritional and functional products."
author: "袁来"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-09-01"
language: "en"
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# Former Jia Duobao and Special Forces Coconut Juice Executives Launch Seasoning Brand—Kouwei Quan, Redefining the Seasoning 3.0 Era

> As the new consumption entrepreneurship wave heats up, more executives from traditional FMCG giants are joining the startup fray. Kouwei Quan, founded by a former sales executive with over 20 years of experience, has completed two rounds of financing within three months, aiming to redefine the seasoning industry with a focus on nutritional and functional products.

**Click to read the original article for details**
Recently, while communicating with many brand owners, one clear feeling emerged: **as the new consumption entrepreneurship boom is ignited, more and more executives and professional managers from traditional FMCG giants are eagerly joining the ranks of new consumption startups.**
Compared to entrepreneurs from internet e-commerce backgrounds, they may be slightly disadvantaged in new tactics and traffic, but in FMCG sectors like food, beverages, and seasonings, 70% of business happens offline. Clearly, these traditional FMCG veterans have unique experience and resource advantages. A while ago, I had an in-depth exchange with Mr. Wu Hao, founder of Kouwei Quan, a new domestic seasoning brand. With over 20 years of FMCG sales experience, he completed two rounds of financing from angel to pre-A within just three months.
This clearly shows the capital side's recognition and pursuit of him and the Kouwei Quan brand he founded.
The following is the content of the exchange with Mr. Wu Hao, **from entrepreneurial background, opportunity insight, to channel tactics and product innovation. I hope it brings some inspiration to seasoning practitioners and new consumption entrepreneurs entering the offline space.**
**Discovering the upgrade opportunity in seasonings during market operations** Before founding Kouwei Quan, starting in 2003, Wu Hao successively worked at Uni-President, Nongfu Spring, Jia Duobao, and Special Forces, serving as a sales executive until 2020. When asked why he crossed over to start a seasoning business, Wu Hao said that while managing national sales for Special Forces coconut juice, he found that nearly 30%-40% of distributors also dealt in seasonings. This serendipity gave him the opportunity to deeply understand the seasoning market. Through frequent cooperation and exchanges with seasoning distributors, Wu Hao discovered two important issues: **First, the offline marketing management of seasonings is very backward.** When he was a sales executive at Special Forces, they always empowered and trained distributors, guiding them on how to become formal trading companies. These actions seem to have never been done by seasoning companies before, including well-known national seasoning giants. The backwardness of marketing thinking and models was the first opportunity he saw.
**Second, following the marketing model, he continued to observe the products under seasonings.** Due to his previous work experience, Wu Hao was not only responsible for sales but also for new product promotion and development. Because of professional habits, he often paid attention to product ingredient lists. He found that the additives in seasoning products were long lists. These additives are outdated or even taboo in current beverage products. Beverage product innovation has always been at the forefront of the FMCG field, constantly updating and iterating. In contrast, seasonings seem to have been calm, with few people making breakthroughs. This was the second product opportunity Wu Hao saw. Additionally, because Wu Hao was immersed in the market daily, he could clearly feel the changes in quality demand brought by consumption upgrades. Coupled with the 2020 pandemic, the search weight of online e-commerce seasoning categories increased rapidly. Combining these factors, Wu Hao concluded that the opportunity for seasoning entrepreneurship had arrived.
According to Wu Hao, the team truly started the project in April 2020. After four months of R&D, it wasn't until August that a sample product—enzyme live soy sauce—was finally produced. Different from traditional sun-dried soy sauce, it is positioned as "non-sun-dried live soy sauce."
Kouwei Quan enzyme live soy sauce
Subsequently, the company was registered and established. By January 2021, another five months later, the first batch of Kouwei Quan products finally came out.
To verify market and consumer acceptance, Wu Hao chose Hefei, the capital of fresh produce, as the first sample market, deploying 200 terminal stores for testing. The actual terminal performance was very good. Coming from a traditional FMCG background, he originally wanted to work quietly on the market, but unexpectedly attracted capital attention. In January, he completed an angel round of financing, and by April, he quickly completed a 50 million yuan pre-A round. With the money, Kouwei Quan began its layout across East China. As of now, covering districts and counties, it has reached nearly 100 distributors across Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, and Anhui.
**Building channel barriers with the FMCG channel intensive cultivation model** Compared to other new consumer products, Kouwei Quan is one of the few brands that started offline. Besides the fact that the consumption attributes of seasonings determine that offline is the main source of business, there is another point: the founding team. Wu Hao admitted that 90% of the current team are former Jia Duobao members. Therefore, they are very proficient and smooth in offline operations and tactics.
In the past, the offline channel model for seasonings mainly relied on KA and farmers' markets, deeply binding distributors, simple and crude, achieving product distribution coverage through stocking and rebates.
But Kouwei Quan's approach is completely different, providing distributors with personnel support, expense support, and even controlling some stores themselves. **In core stores in a regional market, such as fresh produce supermarkets and premium supermarkets, they implement direct control of terminal stores. They focus on store brand image, placement of promotional materials, competition for shelf display, and consumer interception.**
In Wu Hao's words, **"Kouwei Quan uses beverage channel intensive cultivation tactics and terminal interception consumer education to counter the traditional crude seasoning approach."** Frankly, traditional seasoning companies do not have a complete frontline sales representative organizational structure offline; they are used to being crude. But the Kouwei Quan team comes from the beverage industry and is very familiar with frontline distribution coverage and display sales. As long as they find the right distributors and match the right stores, per-store output can be higher than beverages. Of course, this does not mean Kouwei Quan only focuses on offline and ignores online. Wu Hao said that once offline has a basic coverage, they will also make efforts online. In the future, seasonings will definitely integrate online and offline; offline is for direct purchase behavior, while online focuses on brand awareness communication. To this end, Wu Hao established an e-commerce department in Hangzhou, divided into two independent departments: one for platform e-commerce and one for short video live streaming e-commerce. Online serves both sales and brand promotion value.
**Redefining the Seasoning 3.0 Era** Wu Hao divides the development of Chinese seasonings into three stages: 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. The 1.0 era includes light soy sauce and dark soy sauce, with basic meal attributes, mainly for seasoning and coloring. **The 2.0 era features "0" additives, organic, and reduced salt, with basic health attributes, advocating health as the core; while the 3.0 era is Kouwei Quan's prediction for the future market, based on health, with functional nutritional segmentation.**
Kouwei Quan positions its products as "nutritional seasonings," not just 0 additives, but also rich in enzymes. For example, dietary fiber soy sauce for weight loss groups, high-protein soy sauce. In the vinegar category, grape vinegar for weight loss and antioxidant effects, etc. Through **product segmentation, function segmentation, and crowd segmentation**, the positioning of Kouwei Quan's "nutritional seasonings" penetrates the minds of target consumers.
Kouwei Quan brand positioning
In the past year, Kouwei Quan concentrated its efforts on building the "enzyme live soy sauce" product, the first nutritional seasoning product. Next, Kouwei Quan will gradually enrich its product line, embedding the concept of nutritional seasoning deeply in the Kouwei Quan brand.
**Final thoughts:** Looking back on this year of entrepreneurship, Wu Hao sighed and said, first of all, thanks to the previous batch of young entrepreneurs from internet giants. Their leapfrog thinking pushed the iteration and upgrade of Chinese products onto a fast track. This also inspired us, the operators of traditional consumer goods giants, to join the entrepreneurial wave, contributing our strength to the rise of new domestic brands based on past abilities and accumulation, and realizing new value. From the Kouwei Quan case, it is not difficult to see that today's new consumption entrepreneurship is spreading from internet giants to traditional FMCG giants. A new wave of entrepreneurship led by executive operators is coming at us!
 *On September 23-25, at the 2021 4th China FMCG Conference hosted by New Distribution, we have also invited Mr. Wu Hao of Kouwei Quan as a speaker to share more practical experience summaries of innovative consumer brand entrepreneurship. Interested friends, don't miss it!*
**Are you "watching" me?**


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