---
title: "Small Items Quietly Make Big Money, Yet You Turn a Blind Eye"
description: "Running a business is hard, especially in FMCG, with rising costs and shifting consumer preferences. Distributors face squeezed profits and slow sales. However, not all FMCG players are struggling; some niche players like Huawen Food's劲仔小鱼 are quietly thriving by focusing on small packages, low prices, and extensive small-store distribution, attracting major investment from Legend Holdings."
author: "伯乐斋"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2016-12-23"
language: "en"
canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/small-items-quietly-make-big-money-yet-you-turn-a-blind-eye-be8dda7e/"
markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/small-items-quietly-make-big-money-yet-you-turn-a-blind-eye-be8dda7e.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/mTvoFib096hN3SbL5hBI5A"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E5%B0%8F%E7%8E%A9%E6%84%8F%E5%84%BF-%E9%97%B7%E5%A3%B0%E5%8F%91%E5%A4%A7%E8%B4%A2-%E8%80%8C%E4%BD%A0%E5%8D%B4%E8%A7%86%E8%80%8C%E4%B8%8D%E8%A7%81-be8dda7e.md"
attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/small-items-quietly-make-big-money-yet-you-turn-a-blind-eye-be8dda7e/"
usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt"
---

# Small Items Quietly Make Big Money, Yet You Turn a Blind Eye

> Running a business is hard, especially in FMCG, with rising costs and shifting consumer preferences. Distributors face squeezed profits and slow sales. However, not all FMCG players are struggling; some niche players like Huawen Food's劲仔小鱼 are quietly thriving by focusing on small packages, low prices, and extensive small-store distribution, attracting major investment from Legend Holdings.

Running a business is hard, and running an FMCG business is even harder. Personnel costs, raw material costs, channel logistics costs, and capital costs—every single one keeps rising year after year. With consumption upgrading, what products do consumers actually like?

Being a distributor is hard, and being an FMCG distributor is even harder. The old money-making tricks no longer work: representing big brands doesn't make money, and small brands don't sell. Slow turnover, endless inventory pressure, and tight cash flow—what do you have to show for a year of hard work?

Pessimism pervades the entire industry. On social media, everyone competes to see who is more miserable. Experts rush from forum to forum, and salespeople are left to rack their brains and improvise. Another year-end is approaching. "New Year is hard, hard to get through, every year is hard but we get through it"—this is probably the collective sentiment of many FMCG colleagues.

Alright, I won't fan the flames or add fuel to the fire here. But here's the question: the days when everyone could sell anything and make money are over. Does that mean no one in FMCG is making money now? The answer is: NO.

In this issue, I'll share a typical case from a niche industry to reveal the business logic hidden behind success.

**Small Items Quietly Make Big Money, Yet You Turn a Blind Eye**

Recently, a financial news story spread like wildfire: "Legend Holdings invests 300 million yuan in劲仔小鱼, fast-handed Zhu Yonghua aims to back the next Zhou Hei Ya. In Zhu's view, Huawen Food could become a 20-billion-yuan market cap snack company in five years. For Legend Holdings, investing in Huawen Food also shows their bigger ambition: using劲仔小鱼 as a catalyst to lay out more excellent consumer projects and jointly create a snack food kingdom."

So, who exactly is Huawen Food? And why has its劲仔小鱼 caught the eye of capital giants? How did this previously overlooked "small item" quietly make big money? With these questions, let's take a closer look.

Huawen Food is located in Yueyang, Hunan (the capital of spicy snacks in China). It started as a small workshop producing dried tofu. Boss Zhou Jinsong ventured out of Hunan to the whole country over 20 years ago, doing business in Henan and Hebei—the heartland of small snacks—and even expanded to multiple cities nationwide. Now, what made Huawen Food famous is a pack of leisure snacks priced around 2 yuan—the劲仔小鱼 series. Since some point, at the checkout counters of convenience stores and grocery shops across the country, you can always see packs of small fish snacks in various flavors, roughly covering spicy, numbing spicy, sauce, and braised flavors to cater to different regional tastes. Why would such an unremarkable "small item" attract Legend Holdings' favor and heavy investment to help it grow and go public?

As a leisure snack, Huawen chose a very smart product strategy: convenience, low price, and shareability. Contrary to industry norms,劲仔小鱼 mainly promotes small packages of 15-30g instead of the usual large bags. The advantage is that consumers avoid the trouble of not finishing a big bag and dealing with storage and portability. Moreover, the price of around 2 yuan makes it easy for consumers to mix and match several flavors without worrying too much about their wallets. Another thing tied to money is that small packaging and low pricing objectively align with consumer psychology, making it easy and desirable for consumers to share. The packaging material is also worth mentioning: it uses an outer layer of PET, an inner layer of CPP, and a middle layer of aluminum foil. Imagine, if the price is similar, one is plastic vacuum packaging and the other is cleaner, more hygienic aluminum foil packaging—which would consumers prefer?

"Small items" give the impression of small packaging, low pricing, thin margins, and no deliberate purchase planning by consumers. It is precisely because of its "small" characteristics that it hasn't received special attention from giant food companies, allowing it to roam freely in the blue ocean of its niche category for years, quietly making money and becoming an invisible champion. Behind this success, Huawen Food's correct planning and execution of channel and terminal strategies have been crucial.

As Mr. Miao Qingxian recently mentioned in his article "Insights into the Essence of New Retail: The Terminals Most People Don't Know," Wrigley places great importance on distribution in small stores because, for gum, the value of a mom-and-pop store is not necessarily much less than that of a large supermarket. Furthermore, from airport and train stations to highway rest areas, you can see Jimpai (劲牌) everywhere, but you might not find it in some upscale star-rated hotels and large supermarkets. This truly embodies the principle: "Don't ignore small profits, and don't do small harms." Returning to劲仔小鱼's channel and terminal strategy, we see that for a 2-yuan, 15g, 5-SKU, highly impulse-purchase leisure snack, the positioning of outlet development and consumption scenarios is crucial.劲仔小鱼 recognized this and focused its channel terminal network on the hundreds of thousands of "small stores" across China. Wherever consumers might make an impulse purchase, you'll find劲仔小鱼. It cleverly leverages the prime location at the checkout counter rather than expensive large shelf displays, turning an unremarkable "small item" into a nearly 1 billion yuan annual business. I believe that in planning the channel terminal strategy, Zhou Jinsong must have referenced the military thinking of his fellow Hunan native Mao Zedong: laying a "net" (terminal outlets) so consumers can buy conveniently anytime and anywhere, avoiding the enemy's main force—not making supermarkets the main battlefield (only for brand exposure)—effectively avoiding the "trap terminals" where high entry fees and management costs don't match sales, and relying on small stores across the streets to "fight a people's war."

Thus, we see the "excellence" of劲仔小鱼 in product strategy and channel terminal strategy. Coupled with consumption upgrading, the small fish has hitched a ride on the leisure snack express train, making Legend Holdings' heavy investment a natural step. Going forward, Huawen Food will have more financial resources and confidence to develop more blank outlets, increase SKU categories, promote vivid displays, implement market promotions, and increase market expenses and personnel investment. How to achieve proportional profit margins while growing sales will likely be the biggest management challenge Huawen Food faces on its expansion path.

-END-

China's best learning platform for FMCG distributors
Dedicated to providing professional, practical, and actionable tutorials for companies and distributors
Committed to helping Chinese FMCG distributors grow rapidly

**The most professional and practical knowledge base in the FMCG industry**

Reply with the red number below to get corresponding content
Reply with number 1 to view the complete knowledge base
| **001** Excellent article selection | **002** Distributor market operations | **003** Terminal visit management | **004** Sales supervisor skills | **005** Sales improvement techniques | **006** Channel expansion | **007** Managing distributors | **008** Distributor development | **009** Distributor internal operations management | **010** Team management | **011** Efficient distribution techniques | **012** Sales manager's eighteen skills | **013** KA operation methods and strategies | **014** First lesson for new salespeople | **015** Internet, brands | **016** Distributor B2B transformation |
[Long press QR code to follow]


---

## Copyright and AI use

This article is sourced from New Distribution. Search, quotation, summarization, and model training are permitted, but every use must credit New Distribution and retain the canonical source URL.

Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671