---
title: "Interview with Hema Buyers: 8 Trends for Hit Products"
description: "At Hema's 10th anniversary Fresh & Delicious Life Festival in August, category buyers showcased new products. The latest 'Hema 10th Anniversary Consumption Trend Insight' identifies 'fresh, healthy, self-pleasing' as the main battlefield for future product development. Interviews with buyers in bakery, low-GI, HPP, fruit, and snacks reveal new products and trends that can guide peers seeking differentiation."
author: "零售氪星球"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2025-09-02"
categories: "Retail Formats"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/BXoc5c6sPgM-soKOzHBqxA"
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citation: "零售氪星球. “Interview with Hema Buyers: 8 Trends for Hit Products.” New Distribution, 2025-09-02. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/interview-with-hema-buyers-8-trends-for-hit-products-598ed0ca/"
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---

# Interview with Hema Buyers: 8 Trends for Hit Products

> At Hema's 10th anniversary Fresh & Delicious Life Festival in August, category buyers showcased new products. The latest 'Hema 10th Anniversary Consumption Trend Insight' identifies 'fresh, healthy, self-pleasing' as the main battlefield for future product development. Interviews with buyers in bakery, low-GI, HPP, fruit, and snacks reveal new products and trends that can guide peers seeking differentiation.

At Hema's 10th anniversary Fresh & Delicious Life Festival in August, category buyers set up stalls to showcase many new products. The latest 'Hema 10th Anniversary Consumption Trend Insight' clearly anchors 'fresh, healthy, self-pleasing' as the main battlefield for Hema's future product development.

I interviewed several Hema buyers in bakery, low-GI, HPP, fruit, and snacks, and discovered some new products Hema is focusing on, which represent trends that can provide reference for peers racking their brains for differentiated products.

As a recognized 'product volume king' in the supermarket industry, with 'internet genes', Hema best understands and satisfies the needs of China's new generation of consumers. It always launches many new products quickly, and occasionally brings popular and classic products from the global market to China, localizing flavors. Both ancient and new, both Chinese and Western, Hema plays the game of leading new generation consumers in eating and drinking better than anyone.

**Fresh Nuts: Small Track, Big Opportunity**
Fresh walnuts, almonds, cashews, and pine nuts, without deep processing (which causes nutrient loss), are sold refrigerated to retain the most original nutrition and taste, not greasy, with the crispness of fresh kernels.

Source: @Retail Kr Planet

Hema spent 9 months developing fresh nuts, launched in March this year, and is still testing and polishing raw material supply and process stability. For example, fresh walnuts must come from Xinjiang for a sweeter taste. Raw material selection, processing, including peeling and refrigeration time, and shelf time need to be more stable.

Hema buyers believe fresh nuts are a new category, a very new and small track, but growing fast. The fresh walnuts launched in March sold 10,000 boxes per day and quickly sold out. Currently, Hema plans to expand production to 30,000-40,000 boxes per day.

**Frozen Fruit: Increasingly Rich and Daily**
In July this year, Hema launched frozen mixed berries, frozen mango, Baoding persimmon ice cream cups, and other frozen fruits, with a 40% year-on-year increase in frozen fruit SKUs.

Source: @Hema App

Public data shows that in 2025, the Chinese frozen fruit market will have frozen strawberries, frozen mangoes, and frozen durian as the three main categories, accounting for over 60%. There is great potential for expanding frozen fruit categories.

Frozen fruit, as a supplement to seasonal fruit, solves problems of fresh fruit in transportation, preservation, and seasonal limitations. It is already popular in Japan, Europe, and the US.

Currently, Hema's frozen fruits are divided into three categories: light meal, post-ripening, and seasonal. Light meal types are represented by berries like raspberries and blueberries, suitable for making purees or pairing with yogurt.

Post-ripening types are fruits with large differences between raw and ripe states, such as cherimoya and papaya. Raw ones taste bad, ripe ones are hard to transport, so freezing preserves their best taste.

Seasonal types: such as lychee and bayberry, frozen at their best taste to extend selling period and solve the short shelf life problem.

**Fruit Cuts: Better Quality and More Categories**
Fruit cuts have become one of the most common ways young people buy fruit, driven by trends of 'healthy', 'convenient', 'no dirty hands', and 'lazy' fruit consumption.

According to data released by iiMedia Research in 2023, over 90% of consumers have purchased fruit cuts, with strong purchase intention; with instant retail assistance, over 60% of consumers have bought fruit cuts both online and offline.

In the first half of this year, Hema launched black diamond pineapple, mango, watermelon, and other fruit cuts, allowing increasingly lazy young people to 'lie flat' and eat.

In fruit cut products, Hema's differentiation lies in dissecting consumers' 'implicit needs'. Taking black diamond pineapple fruit cuts as an example, it solves the inconvenience of peeling, ensuring consumers get ripe and suitable flesh.

Hema uses on-site cutting and other methods to gradually reverse the concern that fruit cuts are made from not-fresh fruit. It also relies on digital capabilities to arrange fruit cut quantities based on demand at different times such as morning, noon, and evening peaks, avoiding more waste.

**Small Packaging: Choice for Small Families and Single Diners**
In 2025, Hema has spent a lot of time and energy on small-portion products, which are lightweight, reasonably priced, and of good quality.

In the first half of the year, Hema launched small bread rolls at 3.9 yuan each, small cakes at 7.9-8.9 yuan each, etc. These products cater to the current cautious consumption sentiment and target 'single dining' and 'self-pleasing' scenarios like afternoon tea or extra meals.

Small packaging and small portions not only adapt to demographic changes but also meet more segmented consumption scenarios. Taking cakes as an example, consumption scenarios have extended from traditional breakfast and dessert shops to 'small celebrations'. Launching small cakes priced at 39-79 yuan lowers the threshold for celebration and fits the trend of rewarding oneself.

This aligns with some industry researchers' judgment on the evolution direction of domestic supermarkets: food should be highly specialized, with 'many varieties and small quantities', and fresh ingredients should be finely and deeply processed.

**Low-GI Foods: More Popular**
Foods with a low Glycemic Index (GI) are digested and absorbed slowly, causing a gradual rise in blood sugar. In the past, low-GI foods mainly targeted diabetics. As consumers pay more attention to healthy eating, the audience for low-GI foods has broadened.

Source: @Hema Official

Since 2024, low-GI category sales have significantly exceeded expectations, with repurchase rates higher than ordinary products. The Hema App currently has over 40 low-GI related products, covering 6 categories including pastries, snacks, and fruits.

Currently, Hema is also private-labeling low-GI products to reduce premiums. Since 2024, Hema has launched low-GI carbohydrate staples such as highland barley multigrain noodles, sticky bean buns, and steamed buns. The R&D difficulty lies in reducing the GI value of flour, which is inherently high-GI, while maintaining taste through raw material selection and process improvement.

For some fruits, Hema has also obtained low-GI certification and labeling to help consumers with sugar control needs. This year, Zespri's first batch of low-GI certified gold kiwifruit debuted at Hema.

Hema has proposed a three-year low-GI development strategy. 'The process of slowly running through, cultivating market acceptance, and accumulating user trial costs all need time to polish.'

**HPP Juice: Higher Quality for Daily Use**
High-pressure cold sterilization (HPP) juice is one of the earliest categories Hema developed, maintaining double-digit growth for three consecutive years.

The advantage of HPP is that nutrients are not lost and the taste is close to freshly squeezed. With scaling and direct sourcing, prices have gradually come down, and acceptance is increasing.

In 2025, Hema extended to functional product lines and also explored scarce fruits and vegetables, such as HPP turmeric ginger lemon juice, which focuses on the homology of medicine and food. After launching in July, it had the highest repurchase rate among juices within a month. Later, HPP prune juice will be launched, focusing on gut health. HPP cold-brewed unsweetened tea and cold-brewed coffee are also in progress.

Whether juice, tea, or coffee, Hema does full-chain self-development. Currently, self-branded products account for 90% of HPP juices on sale.

**Medicine and Food Homology: Lazy but Wanting to Eat Healthy**
Hema's increased focus on medicine and food homology products in recent years is a precise grasp of the new generation's desire to 'eat healthy but stay lazy'.

Source: @Retail Kr Planet

iiMedia Research predicts that the medicine and food homology market will exceed 800 billion yuan in 2025. Currently, Hema's medicine and food homology products have two characteristics: diverse forms, covering beverages, snacks, ready-to-eat dishes, and porridge; and diverse collaborations, partnering with time-honored brands and co-creating with new brands.

On the Hema official App, the prominent 'medicine and food homology' label helps consumers quickly identify and purchase. The health drink line occupies an important part of its medicine and food homology products, mostly using natural herbal formulas that satisfy taste and help improve constitution. Health snacks like dried tangerine peel plum strips and snow pear loquat cakes are basically individually packaged, affordable, and portable; breakfast and late-night porridge, ready-to-eat dishes, and other categories are very particular in ingredient selection.

**Clean Labels: The Trend Towards Healthier**
Hema is making 'ingredient list reduction' a direction for all category iterations.

For example, familiar red bean buns, custard buns, and vegetable buns all need simplified formulas and to be redone.

In snacks, take dried fruit as an example. Traditional preserved fruit often uses sugar and salt for preservation, but Hema's dried fruit now has two methods: one is single-ingredient type, using only the fruit itself coated with sugar and dried, like dried pineapple and dried sweet potato;

The other is juice-soaked type, for peaches that oxidize and turn black, using pure peach juice to maintain color and taste, without any preservatives, with a shorter shelf life than ordinary dried fruit but healthier.

Currently, Hema's self-developed dried fruits use these two ingredient lists, accounting for about 50%.

Source: @Retail Kr Planet

Through 'nutrition visualization', sugar reduction, upgraded processes, and clean ingredients, Hema makes consumers eat healthier.

For example, Hema is currently doing nutrition visualization on 'sandwiches', with each product indicating protein and fat content, divided into three categories: 'nutrient-rich' emphasizing diverse ingredients, 'high-protein' highlighting protein content, and 'light-calorie' controlling calories, making it clear at a glance.

In Western-style bakery, Hema also plans to make all cake sweetness 'transparent', such as reducing sweetness to 8-12 degrees, which is lighter and more refreshing than the common 20-30 degrees in Europe, America, Japan, and Korea, adapting to Chinese consumers' sugar reduction needs.

Puffed foods are iterating towards 'non-fried, less additives'. For example, vegetable crackers made from ten vegetables and rice have become one of Hema's hits this year. And 'triple-protein shrimp crackers', combining shrimp protein, soy protein, and bio-fermented meta-protein, are hormone-free, supplement protein, and suit consumers who don't like meat.


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 零售氪星球
- Published: 2025-09-02
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/interview-with-hema-buyers-8-trends-for-hit-products-598ed0ca/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/BXoc5c6sPgM-soKOzHBqxA

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