Introduction: China's chilled pork industry should be based on a solid whole-industry chain and create product value centered on consumers.
In China, pork has never been just a simple dish; it is the most important symbol of happiness for thousands of households.
Pork is a super huge industry. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, in 2022, China's pig slaughter totaled 699 million heads, averaging about one pig per two people.
But it is also a super volatile industry. The "pig cycle" is a unique phenomenon in this industry, where pork prices fluctuate sharply every so often. This huge price fluctuation not only troubles consumers but also affects economic policy through CPI fluctuations, making it difficult for the industry's overall operating performance to remain stable. Even leading companies in the industry cannot escape the huge impact of the "pig cycle."
How can the pork industry get out of the "pig cycle"? Facing the pig cycle, what other paths can industry companies choose?
Breaking Free from the "Pig Cycle" Requires a Branding Path
Nearly a hundred years ago, the United States had the concept of the pig cycle. The American approach mainly starts from upstream breeding, strengthening supply-side stability through specialized, large-scale, and standardized breeding, thereby smoothing price fluctuations.
After the number of farms dropped by 90%, the U.S. pig cycle extended from a maximum of 3 years to 11 years, and price fluctuations gradually moderated. China is also taking the path of large-scale breeding, but China has its own unique national conditions, such as pig farming still being an important source of income for many farmers. These conditions mean that China's pork industry cannot completely copy the American experience.
What would be China's own experience and path for the pork industry? In this regard, the milk and edible oil industries have blazed a trail of "branding."
Why take the "branding path"? If consumers buy nearly undifferentiated milk or peanut oil, then everything competes on production cost. Every fluctuation in raw materials directly transmits and affects the market; every "raw material cycle" is a "market cycle."
Once a brand has influence in consumers' minds, it gains pricing power. At that point, the price includes not only raw material costs but also product upgrade value, packaging value, brand premium, and so on. The lower the proportion of raw materials in the commodity price, the less the market cycle is affected by the raw material cycle.
In 1991, Arawana first launched small-packaged bottled edible oil, marking the beginning of Chinese people saying goodbye to bulk oil. In 1999, the first bag of Tetra Pak milk in China came off the production line at Mengniu, opening the path to national branding for Chinese milk brands.
Looking back at the development history of milk and food oil, we find that when industries begin to brand and nationalize, they start to truly escape the influence of raw material cycles. From bulk to branded small packaging, and from branding to premiumization, this is the "trilogy" of their branding development.
Creating a mid-to-high-end chilled pork brand, occupying consumers' minds, and thereby gaining the ability to escape or greatly reduce the impact of the "pig cycle"—I believe this is definitely not a new idea, but why haven't we seen particularly successful precedents even today?
Because building a true chilled pork brand is unimaginably difficult.
How Difficult Is It to Build a Chilled Pork Brand?
There have been many pioneers in creating fresh product brands in the agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery industries, such as Deyuanyuan and Huang天鹅 in the egg category, but the difficulty is very high. And building a high-end chilled pork brand is even more difficult than building an egg brand.
Shorter shelf life, harder product standardization, higher supply chain costs, more difficult quality control, and how to let consumers experience differentiated value—every issue is a huge challenge lying ahead.
Current brand exploration in the pork industry mainly focuses on variety concepts such as "native pigs" and "black pigs." Due to limitations in industry chain layout capabilities and costs, there are few national brands in the chilled pork category; most are local brands.
But consumer demand and consumption patterns have already undergone tremendous changes. In recent years, affected by the epidemic, consumers have increasingly higher requirements for dietary health and meat safety, which has accelerated the small-packaging and branding of chilled meat.
The changes on the demand side have a very direct impact on the supply side. Because agricultural products upstream of fresh e-commerce need to achieve standardization, strict grading, sorting, and standardized packaging must be done at the place of origin to improve supply chain efficiency, form large-scale harvesting/slaughtering, processing, and transportation, and then use better products, faster delivery, and better experience to attract more downstream consumers.
This two-way change has already been reflected in China. For example, in some Walmart stores, the fresh meat counters no longer have butchers; all products are small-packaged chilled meat, and even vegetables are small-packaged. This is actually very close to the fresh retail methods in Europe and the United States.
Supply and demand influence each other bidirectionally and are mutually causal. Upgrades in product technology affect changes in consumption trends; the stimulation of consumer demand in turn accelerates changes and innovation on the supply side.
Although building a brand in the chilled pork field is very difficult, the bright prospects after branding still attract a large number of leading pork industry companies to continuously explore and practice, and they have begun to gain some market experience and achievements.
How to Build a High-End Chilled Pork Brand?
Compared with other FMCG products such as food and beverages, building a household-name high-end chilled pork brand requires overcoming at least three major hurdles: industry chain capability, product standardization, and brand marketing capability.
1) Industry chain is the ticket to national branding
The pork industry is one that extremely tests industry chain capability. If capability is insufficient, either quality control is unstable, supply is insufficient, or costs are too high. From feed, breeding, slaughtering and processing, logistics, to channel layout, if one link fails, the entire chain loses.
Only with a nationwide network of breeding and slaughtering/processing, and sufficient influence in the upstream feed segment, is there an opportunity to build a national brand. But laying out a nationwide breeding and slaughtering/processing network is no easy task; it requires not only strong capital and technological investment but also years of deep cultivation in the pork industry.
Looking at the entire pork industry, there are actually not many companies with this industrial condition. Only a few companies such as Wens, Jiajiakang, Muyuan, New Hope, and Tech-bank have obtained this ticket to the whole industry chain.
Among these industry giants, Jiajiakang's industry chain has unique characteristics. Jiajiakang has more than 100 breeding bases and multiple slaughtering and processing bases nationwide, possessing the "breadth" of a national industry chain, but at the same time, it also has the "depth" of the whole industry chain.
Relying on the strength of COFCO Group, Jiajiakang's whole industry chain completely covers the entire chain from feed to breeding, to reproduction, to processing and circulation, and through strict standards controls the five core links of "environment, feed, breeding, reproduction, and processing," ensuring that a piece of pork is controlled and traceable from the source to the consumer's table. The "depth" of the whole industry chain is precisely what most breeding companies find difficult to achieve.
2) Product standardization is the foundation of consumer trust in the brand
Standardization of chilled pork products is very difficult (e.g., weight, cuts), shelf life is short, and supply chain difficulty is high. Therefore, building consumer trust is particularly difficult. Just one bad experience can destroy a consumer's trust in a chilled pork brand.
But product standardization is the foundation of all branding. Only standardized branded products can meet consumers' stable expectations. The reason why FMCG products have the most brands is that their products are the easiest to standardize.
The standardization of chilled pork is actually divided into two levels: consistent meat quality and consistency in specifications and packaging of the same product. The difficulty of standardizing fresh products lies precisely in these two points.
For quality standardization, Jiajiakang's experience is the entire set of scientific and standardized production processes behind "Five Safety Gates, Self-Raised Good Quality." With pork raised under such standard breeding as "Five Safety Gates," quality can remain consistently at a high level. This is actually an effective breakthrough in "quality standardization" for the fresh category.
"Five Safety Gates" has another value: it makes consumers start to pay attention to and understand "what is truly safe and good pork." Because of this, Jiajiakang has successively obtained honors and qualifications such as "Meat Food Supplier for the Chinese Sports Delegation 2012-2015," "Preparation Guarantee Product for National Team Athletes of the Sports Training Bureau," "Meat Food Supplier for the Chinese National Weightlifting Team," "Meat Food Supplier and Partner for the Cross-discipline Snowboard National Training Team," and "Partner of China Aerospace," and also supplies meat products to multiple national teams and provincial sports units and teams year-round.
After quality standardization, efforts should be made in processing standardization and packaging technology to give consumers a certain product expectation. For example, Jiajiakang, which pioneered small-packaged meat in China, successfully achieved "no need to cut" meat, allowing consumers to open the box and put it directly into the pot. For young urban families, the upgrade of modified atmosphere packaging plus "no need to cut" is very friendly, and in terms of quality, safety and health are more guaranteed.
The next step after branding is premiumization. To become a truly high-end chilled pork product, after "standardization," continuous investment in technology and R&D is needed to have the opportunity to achieve true product "premiumization."
In high-end product R&D, Jiajiakang independently developed the flaxseed pork high-end product series, bringing the concept of healthy pork into consumers'视野, supporting high-end value with scientific quality data rather than concepts.
Jiajiakang flaxseed pork contains the essential fatty acid α-linolenic acid. According to third-party testing agency tests, the α-linolenic acid content in Jiajiakang flaxseed pork products is more than 6 times that of ordinary pork products of the same cut.
With this technology, Jiajiakang obtained a national invention patent (Patent No. ZL 20181 0723559.5), which is one of the most difficult and highest-standard patents to apply for in China.
From feed formula, feed raw material procurement and acceptance, feed production, feeding management, feeding time, and pig slaughter management, Jiajiakang ensures the product quality of flaxseed pigs through the advantages of the whole industry chain.
3) Brand marketing: moving consumers with scenario-centered approaches
Building a household-name brand has no shortcuts; it requires mental preparation for setting up strong camps, fighting stubborn battles, and waging a protracted war. On this basis, it is even more important to work hard on every touching scenario, persist in direct communication and promotion with consumers, and achieve long-term results.
The just-passed 2023 Spring Festival was a highly anticipated and valued Spring Festival in recent years. During this period, Jiajiakang launched a "heart-attack battle" around target consumer groups.
This Spring Festival was the "first" Spring Festival in three years where families could reunite freely. Jiajiakang launched a series of "heart-touching" marketing promotions around the three core scenarios of "preparing New Year goods," "family reunion," and "New Year's Eve dinner."
For a pork brand, what to say to consumers, how to say it, and how to say it well? Doing these points well is not easy, but truthfulness and sincerity often touch people's hearts the most. This Spring Festival, Jiajiakang innovatively used frontline employees' images and voices, with true and simple language, through 50 "good meat declarations," to tell consumers the brand's real frontline stories. The stories behind the scenes made the brand's core trait of safety and health easier to understand.
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Whether consumer activities are effective often depends not on investment or low prices, but on "heart." In this Spring Festival marketing, Jiajiakang also creatively gave each winning consumer a "Jiajiakang Family Portrait" photo that every family can use during the New Year. The brand slogan "Love at first bite" was more easily accepted by consumers at this special time through the concept of "Hundreds of Jiajiakang Families."
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Brand marketing in the FMCG industry has always been a model for other industries to learn from. From Jiajiakang's practice, whether it is product innovation, communication creativity, activity innovation, or implementation, it has reached the professional level of the FMCG industry and can be called one of the best practices in the branding process of China's pork industry.
Conclusion:
Whether it is the once-hyped internet pig farming or the popularity of native pig and black pig concepts, behind them is the continuous explosion of consumer demand for high-quality chilled pork, which will inevitably trigger huge changes in the industry.
From the history of changes in multiple industries, event marketing and concept hype are destined not to last long. Based on a solid whole-industry chain and creating product value centered on consumers, Jiajiakang's high-end chilled meat brand path is the truly expectable path for China's chilled pork industry.