One of the easiest mistakes to make in today's FMCG industry is to continue treating every distributor problem as a sales, policy, or spending problem.
Those issues certainly matter. But China's FMCG market has moved from an era of broad-based expansion into one of structural growth. Channels have evolved from linear distribution into networked competition, while retail has moved from “stock it and it will sell” to “it sells only when the offer fits.”
What manufacturers and distributors now need to redesign is therefore no longer simply how targets are divided, how spending is allocated, or how much inventory is pushed into the channel. They need to determine how they will manage a regional market together.
That is the key to understanding Wanglaoji's Jidinghui initiative.
On June 9 and 10, Wanglaoji Health held its 2026 Jidinghui Partner Conference in Guangzhou. At the event, the company launched Jidinghui as a strategic cooperation platform built around co-creation, sharing, and mutual success, and inducted the first 99 outstanding partner companies.
Wanglaoji describes Jidinghui as a national platform for high-quality customers and a community of shared destiny through which manufacturers and distributors can pursue long-term development together. Membership standards cover performance, capabilities, compliance, and alignment of values. Wanglaoji will concentrate four categories of core resources—capital, products, marketing, and services—to build a premium partner network.
On the surface, this may look like a conference for key accounts. At a deeper level, however, it is Wanglaoji's attempt to redefine manufacturer-distributor relations for a new business cycle. In the past, the two sides worked mainly around products, pricing, spending, payments, and inventory. In the future, they must work around stores, consumption occasions, sell-through, data, and the ability to operate a regional market.
More Than a Customer Conference: A New Stage in Manufacturer-Distributor Relations
For many years, growth in China's FMCG industry rested on several broad assumptions: the population was growing, channels were expanding, consumption was upgrading, and leading brands were gaining share. For a distributor, securing a strong brand, building channel coverage, and keeping pace with the manufacturer were often enough to share in the industry's growth dividend.
At that stage, the core of the manufacturer-distributor relationship was division of labor.
The manufacturer was responsible for the brand, products, pricing structure, and market spending. The distributor handled warehousing and delivery, store coverage, customer relationships, and payment collection. The two sides still negotiated and sometimes clashed, but as long as the market kept expanding, growth could cover many of their differences.
Today, growth no longer covers those differences automatically.
Channels are increasingly fragmented. Snack discount chains, on-demand retail, livestream e-commerce, community group buying, discount stores, and remodeled supermarkets are all reshaping consumer touchpoints. Retail outlets are becoming more complex.
One distribution playbook could once cover many stores. Today, different stores serve different consumers, price bands, usage occasions, and fulfillment models.
Consumers are also becoming more segmented. The same beverage category requires completely different approaches in foodservice, gifting, convenience, chilled display, on-demand retail, and group-purchase occasions.
This means that distributors cannot remain logistics providers, and manufacturers cannot remain issuers of trade policies.
Their relationship must move from task-based cooperation to operating co-creation.
What Distributors Really Need to Rebuild: Stores and Product Portfolios
During the Jidinghui training program on the morning of June 10, Chen Siting, executive director of New Distribution, presented “Rebuilding Growth: The Next-Generation Operating Model for FMCG Distributors.” His central judgment was that distributors once grew mainly through external tailwinds, but in the future they must grow through internal capabilities. Stores and products are at the heart of those capabilities.
The idea sounds simple, but it is critical to distributor transformation.
Many distributors have traditionally defined their core strengths by the number of customers they have, the size of their vehicle fleet, the number of outlets they can cover, or the quality of their manufacturer relationships. These are all capabilities, but they are no longer sufficient.
What now determines operating quality is whether stores produce consistently, whether the product mix generates healthy profit, whether commercial spending creates sell-through, and whether the actions of the sales team are reviewed and improved.
A store is not merely a number on a customer list. It is an operating unit that must generate orders month after month.
A product portfolio is not the number of brands represented. It is a structured combination of traffic-generating products, profit products, image products, and complementary products.
If a distributor treats a powerful brand such as Wanglaoji as nothing more than an item that can be shipped, the brand's strength will soon be consumed by inefficient distribution, price competition, and inventory pressure.
If the distributor can convert that strong brand into better store management, stronger occasion-based activation, and more effective regional sell-through, the brand becomes a genuine business asset.
The value of Jidinghui, therefore, is not simply that it brings high-quality distributors together. Its value lies in helping them move from acquiring a brand to operating a brand, and from completing assigned targets to jointly managing a regional market.
Retail Transformation Is Really a Redesign of Supply-Demand Matching
Also on the morning of June 10, Ren Wenqing, CEO of New Distribution, presented “Market Realities and FMCG Trends amid Retail Transformation.” He offered an important judgment: the distribution order of FMCG is shifting from a PUSH model to a PULL model.
In the past, manufacturers produced goods, distributors pushed them through the channel, retailers displayed and sold them, and consumers selected from what was available. The core purpose of the chain was to move products downstream.
Today, consumer demand increasingly pulls supply in the opposite direction.
Discount retail is rising not simply because it is cheap, but because it matches consumers' strong preference for predictable price bands.
On-demand retail is growing not simply because delivery is fast, but because it reorganizes assortments, stores and warehouses, and fulfillment around immediate local demand.
Supermarket remodeling is not merely a matter of renovating stores. It means rebuilding the supply mix to match the needs of a specific customer group and occasion.
Channels appear to be changing. What is really changing is the way supply and demand are matched.
In a mature market, products are not scarce. The scarce capability is placing the right product in the right occasion.
This is especially true in beverages. Consumers have different reasons for buying in a hot-pot restaurant, an office, a convenience store, a family gathering, a holiday-gifting occasion, or an on-demand retail platform. The corresponding pack size, price band, display, chilling conditions, product combination, and promotion should also differ.
That is why a manufacturer-distributor community of shared destiny cannot remain an expression of goodwill. If the two sides cannot jointly identify occasions, design actions, and create store-level sell-through, the community will remain a slogan.
A Community of Shared Destiny Means Building Capabilities Together
Many companies talk about manufacturer-distributor win-wins. The difficult part is translating that ambition into action.
During the training, Chen Siting proposed that future co-creation should operate at no fewer than five levels: planning together, building organizations together, creating projects together, sharing investment, and sharing data.
Together, these five practices rewrite the traditional relationship.
In the past, an annual plan often amounted to a breakdown of payment targets. In the future, it must become a regional growth battle map: which channels, stores, occasions, and projects will generate the growth?
In the past, organizational coordination often meant manufacturer and distributor sales teams pressing targets together. In the future, it should combine a small brand-side enablement hub with a strong distributor front line.
The manufacturer provides consumer insight, product strategy, pricing rules, execution materials, and supply-chain support. The distributor provides store coverage, retail relationships, merchandising execution, fast fulfillment, and data feedback.
In the past, market spending was often managed through applications, reimbursement, and compliance checks. In the future, commercial investment must be reviewed through project execution, sell-through results, and return on investment.
That is the real meaning of a community of shared destiny.
It does not mean that manufacturers and distributors simply sit closer together or offer one another more encouragement. It means that both sides face the same region, stores, occasions, and data; invest together; review results together; and share responsibility for the outcome.
Jidinghui Is Built on Wanglaoji's Key-Account Strategy
Jidinghui is not a concept Wanglaoji created in isolation.
- On one hand, the company has a powerful brand foundation. As a representative brand in herbal tea and natural botanical beverages, Wanglaoji owns the classic consumer association of “preventing internal heat” while extending its positioning into the broader territory of natural botanical drinks.
- On the other hand, it has considerable room to develop across consumption occasions. Banquets, gifting, festivals, immediate consumption in foodservice, health-oriented beverages, and emerging channels all require manufacturers and distributors to operate with greater precision.
Wanglaoji plans to keep expanding its product portfolio in natural botanical beverages, deepen its domestic “1+1+N” market structure, and empower partners through its brand, products, channels, and resources.
What matters most is not the resources themselves, but how they enter the operating system:
Capital resources should strengthen the partner's operating resilience.
Product resources should support more occasions and a better assortment structure.
Marketing resources should turn brand strength into store-level sell-through.
Service resources should help partners keep upgrading their capabilities.
If these resources are merely distributed as trade policies, their value is limited. If Jidinghui organizes them into project, training, review, and partner-development mechanisms, their value will multiply.
This is the most significant strength of Jidinghui: it advances manufacturer-distributor cooperation from resource coordination toward joint capability building.
The Real Test Begins after the Awards Ceremony
Jidinghui's real value will not be established on its launch day or through an awards ceremony. It will be tested city by city, channel by channel, and store by store.
Can immediate consumption in foodservice become a repeatable occasion-based program rather than a campaign? Can convenience-store coolers become a chilled sell-through system rather than an equipment-placement exercise? Can on-demand retail become a closed loop of assortment, content, fulfillment, and data rather than simple platform supply? Can holiday gifting move from seasonal channel loading to active management of gifting occasions? Can peak-season campaigns become reviewable growth models rather than spending exercises?
None of this is easy.
It requires manufacturers to change, and it requires distributors to change. Manufacturers cannot simply push targets downward, and distributors cannot simply wait for the next policy.
Manufacturers must understand regions better, while distributors must understand operations better. Manufacturers must provide methods and tools, while distributors must turn those methods into store-level actions. Manufacturers must be willing to examine real data, while distributors must be willing to prove themselves with real results.
From this perspective, New Distribution's participation in the Jidinghui training program was not simply the addition of two courses to a conference. It translated the relationship among industry change, distributor transformation, and manufacturer-distributor co-creation into a methodology that partners could understand, discuss, and take back to their regional markets.
Ren Wenqing explained why the change is happening.
Chen Siting explained how distributors should rebuild growth.
Through Jidinghui, Wanglaoji must answer how a brand and its strongest partners can turn those changes into a new growth order.
The FMCG industry has passed the stage when brand awareness, channel coverage, and commercial spending alone could produce growth naturally.
In the next stage, the best brands will not merely compete for distributors' warehouse space and cash flow. They will help distributors improve their ability to operate regional markets. The best distributors will not simply ask manufacturers for better policies. They will bring regional maps, store lists, occasion-based programs, and review data to the table and build the market together.
That is the broader industry significance of Jidinghui.
It is not simply a new customer circle. It is an attempt to move manufacturer-distributor relations from upstream-downstream cooperation toward a community of capabilities, projects, and growth.
If the model succeeds, Jidinghui will become more than Wanglaoji's own partner platform. It may offer the beverage industry an important example of how manufacturer-distributor relations can evolve.