---
title: "Snack Brands Reassess Pinduoduo Collectively"
description: "As raw material costs rise and traditional e-commerce growth slows, leading snack brands like Qiaqia Food and Three Squirrels are shifting focus to Pinduoduo, where they are achieving significant sales growth and treating it as a strategic platform for new growth curves."
author: "田雨"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2025-12-29"
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# Snack Brands Reassess Pinduoduo Collectively

> As raw material costs rise and traditional e-commerce growth slows, leading snack brands like Qiaqia Food and Three Squirrels are shifting focus to Pinduoduo, where they are achieving significant sales growth and treating it as a strategic platform for new growth curves.

**Source** | Yibang Power
Tian Yu "In the past few years, our growth rate on Pinduoduo has been basically around 50%. In contrast, the overall growth rate on traditional platforms has tended to flatten." Dong Yujie, the Pinduoduo channel manager at Qiaqia Food, recalled.
In his view, Pinduoduo is a platform with a relatively strong growth trend. For this reason, in 2024, Qiaqia Food began to adjust the focus of its e-commerce channels, investing heavily in emerging platforms like Pinduoduo.
On the other hand, Three Squirrels, also headquartered in Anhui, is experiencing a similar new growth story on Pinduoduo. In 2024, its Pinduoduo team delivered a remarkable performance: annual sales jumped from 300 million yuan in 2023 to 600 million yuan, achieving double-digit growth.
This is not an isolated phenomenon.
Against the backdrop of rising raw material costs and persistently high express delivery fees, nut and roasted seed brands are undergoing a collective transformation. Pinduoduo, once viewed as a "white-label battleground," has now become a strategic stronghold for leading brands seeking a second growth curve.
Qiaqia Food has achieved a leap from tens of millions to over one hundred million yuan. This year, Three Squirrels is expected to reach annual sales of 800 million yuan on the platform. These figures reflect both the profound changes in the platform ecosystem and the common choices of brand merchants in the new consumption environment.
From initial cautious trials to heavy investment, from a mere channel choice to an important growth engine, the relationship between brand merchants and Pinduoduo is being redefined.
Discovering a New Continent
"The nut industry is actually a global industry, with core raw materials mainly imported from Southeast Asia, Australia, and other countries," said Wang Sheng, the Pinduoduo channel manager at Three Squirrels. In recent years, due to various factors such as the economic environment, the cost of nut raw materials has been rising.
In the 2025 production season, due to abnormal climate and other factors, the production of various nut raw materials, including hazelnuts and cashews, significantly decreased, directly leading to tight market supply and rising raw material prices.
With rising raw material prices for nuts, rising comprehensive costs such as packaging and logistics, downstream corporate profits are being squeezed, and the industry is facing pressure from slowing growth on traditional e-commerce platforms and the peak of traffic dividends. Wang Sheng and Dong Yujie both observed: "In recent years, some traditional platforms have indeed seen growth hindered and have begun to encounter bottlenecks."
Under internal and external difficulties, finding new outlets has become a top priority, and companies have unanimously turned their attention to Pinduoduo, which is still growing significantly. Wang Sheng said: "We have also been doing Duoduo in the past. If we do it normally, its data still grows and looks good."
Compared to the complex operational skills required on traditional e-commerce platforms, which even require dedicated personnel for ad placement and event participation, Pinduoduo's simple operations are particularly suitable for sellers with supply chain advantages.
Dong Yujie stated that Pinduoduo's overall algorithm logic is already very mature. Compared to other platforms, it has gone further on the path of (quality-price ratio).
Taking big promotions as an example, Pinduoduo does not use various preferential policies to stack up and make consumers combine orders to meet a price. "It is extreme. If I want to do a price, I directly give you this price."
This simplicity and efficiency are not only reflected on the consumer side but also on the merchant operation side. According to the traditional e-commerce platform convention of "a small promotion every 3 days and a big promotion every 5 days," during promotional activities, merchants need to submit various activities and calculate various prices. "This is actually very labor-intensive," Dong Yujie cited as an example.
According to his description, Pinduoduo's promotion is also particularly intelligent, which not only improves the overall efficiency of merchant promotion but also frees up overall operational manpower. Therefore, for merchants, compared to other platforms, operating on Pinduoduo is also easier and more efficient.
Regarding the high efficiency of promotion, Wang Sheng has had similar experiences and feelings. He cited an example: "After investing in whole-site promotion, the platform's data presentation is very efficient, and currently, it is superior to other platforms in terms of efficiency and time."
Wang Sheng also pointed out that when a product is listed on Duoduo's resource positions, the platform's algorithm for recommending to consumers is also very precise. "After it recommends, the traffic and consumer conversion data are better than other platforms."
The time from listing to becoming a bestseller on Pinduoduo can be greatly shortened, and operational costs are reduced accordingly. Many merchants call its differentiated advantage "high efficiency in new product incubation."
Dong Yujie worked on traditional e-commerce last year. Based on his experience, a product with potential can be successfully promoted on Pinduoduo in one month, while it takes three months on traditional e-commerce platforms. For example, Qiaqia Food launched coriander-flavored melon seeds on Pinduoduo, and sales reached hundreds of thousands of yuan in just over half a month. Dong Yujie summarized: "On the one hand, the product can be expanded to other verified markets; on the other hand, it also gives us confidence in developing new and novel flavors."
Not only Three Squirrels and Qiaqia Food, but many brand merchants have also discovered that in recent years, Pinduoduo's ecosystem has quietly changed.
Wang Sheng stated that the core merchants on Pinduoduo have expanded from traditional industrial belt white-label merchants to leading brand merchants. In his view, when Pinduoduo launched the Billion Subsidy in 2019, it had already begun to upgrade its brand supply. "However, in 2020, when we searched for products, most were still white-label, but in recent years, a considerable portion has been occupied by brand merchants."
"Brands can also achieve great success on Pinduoduo." Not only Wang Sheng, but Dong Yujie also has a similar feeling. For example, Pinduoduo's staff will focus on connecting with brand merchants and provide different resource positions and support policies based on star ratings.
For this reason, from Three Squirrels to Qiaqia, a group of leading brands have begun to no longer view Pinduoduo merely as a marginal channel, but as a core growth position, investing heavily in operations.
In fact, after the industry as a whole entered a new cycle of "high costs + peak traffic," what nut and roasted seed brands have found on Pinduoduo is not just an incremental business field, but also a new growth path that is closer to user needs and efficiency-oriented.
New Position, New Playbook
For these brand merchants, Pinduoduo is like a long-neglected new continent, and old playbooks and models cannot be directly copied.
Wang Sheng recalled to the author: Three Squirrels had been in contact with Pinduoduo as early as 2016, but due to some external factors, it never fully committed until 2021 when it began to invest heavily.
"At that time, the company's understanding of Duoduo was still relatively chaotic. We treated it as a normal channel and did not make additional investments," Wang Sheng said.
With changes in the consumption environment and the failure of traditional e-commerce channel growth, in the second half of 2023, Three Squirrels focused its investment on Pinduoduo. Before that, Three Squirrels mainly adopted a large-store model on traditional e-commerce platforms, with daily sales of millions, tens of millions, or even over one hundred million. But on Pinduoduo, they found that the previous large-store model was very difficult to operate. After communicating with many peers, Three Squirrels turned to try the store-group model.
"On Duoduo, the core operation is not a single store, but the product. The measurement indicator is not the growth in the number of stores, but whether there are effective links," Wang Sheng summarized. "We use multiple stores to race horses, so we can run more products out."
The advantage of this store-group model is that it can quickly find bestsellers through multi-store testing and maximize sales opportunities through matrix operations.
Three Squirrels now has 68 direct-operated stores on Pinduoduo. Wang Sheng said: "Pinduoduo has a low frequency of promotions, relatively stable resource positions, and promotion is not complicated. The intelligent system can help us with ad placement." In this way, people's energy is mostly used for link maintenance and product transformation. "68 stores can be fully handled by 18 people, and the per-person efficiency is very high."
Image: Screenshot of some of Three Squirrels' direct-operated stores on Pinduoduo
To adapt the organization to Pinduoduo's high growth, Three Squirrels adjusts the per-person efficiency of the team organization based on fluctuations in platform sales volume. For example, for every certain increase in sales, a certain number of personnel will be added.
According to the author's understanding, Three Squirrels also reduces the number of product handling times and lowers logistics fulfillment costs to achieve the optimal logistics cost ratio on Pinduoduo.
In fact, in the past few years, in order to adapt to Pinduoduo's platform characteristics, brands have begun to adjust from product, supply chain, and organization aspects, thereby developing an effective growth model.
Wang Sheng cited an example: "Previously, we directly copied best-selling products from other platforms, but on Pinduoduo, their price range, specifications, and packaging may not be suitable. We will make differentiated transformations and provide products with the same price but better quality, such as adjusting packaging specifications and reducing unnecessary processes to lower costs."
Based on years of experience, Dong Yujie observed that a large portion of Pinduoduo's consumer base likes to try new things. He took the typical group of students as an example: "To try new things, they will pay, but they will not pay a lot."
Based on such consumption characteristics, Qiaqia Food will develop new products with small specifications and multiple packs in a targeted manner. Even more, they will test some unique new flavors, such as osmanthus milk tea flavor and coriander-flavored melon seeds.
During holidays, Qiaqia Food will also launch large packages of around 500g, or even large cans, to facilitate consumers' stockpiling.
Similarly, each resource position and each field on Pinduoduo corresponds to different groups of people, and consumption habits naturally differ.
For example, in flash sale activities, Qiaqia Food will place some small-pack products with lower unit prices, which are also suitable for trying new things. In the Billion Subsidy activities, Qiaqia Food mainly promotes medium and large specifications such as 200g and 400g.
In his view, selling products on Pinduoduo does not necessarily mean being cheap. Because "consumers do not want pure cheapness; they want quality-price ratio. When they buy things, they feel that the quality and price range of the product meet their needs, not that they will buy just because it is cheap."
At the same time, in frequent communication with the platform, industry staff will also sort out industry bestseller trends for merchants and provide directional suggestions and guidance on product development.
"In terms of trends, the staff can see the situation of different sub-categories from the platform perspective and will recommend that we pay attention to trend products and brands," Wang Sheng cited as an example. "For example, previously our nut gift boxes were mostly boxed or bagged. Last year, canned products were hot-selling. The staff reminded us and recommended positioning in the price range. After overall design and development, we adapted canned products, and sales during the New Year's goods festival last year exceeded expectations."
In summary, a model of "customization-optimization-adaptation" has become the standard solution for brands to achieve scale expansion on Pinduoduo. As traditional channel playbooks gradually solidify, new channels are forcing brands to reconstruct organizational capabilities, supply chain efficiency, and product strategies. Pinduoduo is becoming the core testing ground for this "business methodology revolution."
Reshaped Channels and Growth Logic
Now, for Three Squirrels and Qiaqia Food, Pinduoduo has changed from a passively chosen "selling channel" to an actively chosen "growth engine." "Previously, Pinduoduo accounted for less than 3% of Three Squirrels' online channels, but now it is close to 10%." This change is not only reflected in sales data growth but also in the depth and breadth of brand-platform cooperation, and brand growth is no longer limited to old categories.
Three Squirrels has nearly 70 direct-operated stores on Pinduoduo. Although the products are still mainly core nuts and roasted seeds, it is also actively expanding new categories such as health foods.
"It is still in the overall testing stage. Some products have run out, but they are not yet at scale," Wang Sheng revealed. Duoduo's users have relatively high requirements for new products. To be accepted, they must be truly outstanding. Ultimately, this type of category expansion must return to deep insight into user needs.
Similarly, Qiaqia Food, which started with melon seeds, has also begun to focus on expanding new categories such as nuts. Dong Yujie shared a typical case: Last year, during communication with Pinduoduo staff, combined with the industry trend in nut procurement volume, Qiaqia Food judged that this might be a relatively trendy bestseller.
Therefore, they decided to incubate the shelled nut category from scratch. But this posed a challenge to Qiaqia Food's supply chain. "I can sell it, but if the goods cannot come out, it is useless." To keep up with sales on Pinduoduo, Qiaqia Food specially added several production lines for shelled nuts last year.
The author learned that this year, Qiaqia Food has laid out the above new products across all channels, but the specifications and can design shapes will differ across platforms.
On the other hand, in the context of rising nut raw material prices, the order scale brought by the platform can also help brands enhance their bargaining power when purchasing raw materials. "Because general procurement is based on order quantity, and then we negotiate prices. Therefore, a large order volume is an advantage," Dong Yujie explained.
Beyond nuts, Qiaqia also plans to expand new products such as konjac jerky to find more growth curves. According to Qiaqia's observation, the konjac product market has had good market size and growth in the past two years. After communicating with a konjac raw material processing plant in Thailand, they found that this track is worth trying.
To differentiate from mainstream products on the market, Qiaqia Food decided to focus on flavors, such as Sichuan Ciba chili flavor. "In the end, after overall testing, everyone's feedback was relatively good."
While expanding category boundaries, brand upgrading has also been successfully verified on the Pinduoduo platform. This also means that Pinduoduo has the ability to undertake consumption upgrades.
In the past, Three Squirrels mainly targeted the mid-range market, with products mainly consisting of nuts, dried meat, and other combination products. But this year, it has begun to focus on launching pure nut products, driving the average order value from the previous 19 yuan (per can) to 29 yuan and 39 yuan (per can), successfully entering the mid-to-high-end market.
As Wang Sheng said, today's consumers are returning to rationality. They value "you get what you pay for," rather than blindly seeking bargains. "Pure nut products have also achieved very good sales on Duoduo. Coupled with the platform's resource support, it will highlight the higher quality-price ratio of the products, and consumers' purchase recognition is also relatively high," Wang Sheng added.
Whether it is Three Squirrels or Qiaqia Food, these leading brands have found new growth curves on Pinduoduo, which has confirmed a trend: Pinduoduo is evolving from a "white-label paradise" to a "brand infrastructure."
With traffic dividends fading and cost pressures rising sharply, the brand growth logic has shifted from "seeking novelty" to "seeking substance," pursuing more real users, more efficient supply chains, and more controllable input-output ratios. In this context, Pinduoduo's value to brands is no longer just a sales channel, but has become a "new home field" for fighting costs, testing new products, and reaching a wide range of incremental users to achieve second-curve growth. With extreme efficiency and direct connection to users, it provides a growth path that returns to the essence of business and achieves deterministic scale expansion.
As Wang Sheng said: "Where there is a channel, your product should be available there." Under this logic, Pinduoduo is no longer a multiple-choice question, but a must-answer question.
At a time when growth logic is being completely rewritten, Pinduoduo is not only a part of the brand distribution system, but is growing into a key infrastructure for brands to build long-term competitiveness, achieve category breakthroughs, and expand user reach. Perhaps the next brand growth story and second curve will write a new chapter here.
**【Moving Toward the C-End】********The 11th China FMCG Conference****Time: March 16-18, 2026****Location: Chengdu, China****


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 田雨
- Published: 2025-12-29
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/snack-brands-reassess-pinduoduo-collectively-91f0599c/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/O5rSwuNoXoSH1N0k1FlzvA

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