Pin Yin Hui Observation: Why, after years of deep cultivation in China, can't Yonghui and RT-Mart beat a Sam's Club? Today, the beverage industry's assessment of the market environment has converged: growth is increasingly difficult. From brands to channel distributors to retail terminals, the entire chain feels the pressure of "consumers tightening their wallets"—especially distributors and terminal store owners focused on offline business, who should feel this deeply. From 2025 to now, Pin Yin Hui has also visited over 500 non-chain terminal retail stores. Among them, more than 40% of owners told us their beverage business has declined significantly; 20% of stores saw slight declines; another 20% were flat compared to last year; and only about 40 store owners said their beverage business is growing this year.

In fact, it's not just these independent terminal stores; traditional retail enterprises led by Yonghui and RT-Mart have also had a tough time in recent years. Yonghui's revenue dropped from 90.091 billion yuan in 2022 to 53.508 billion yuan in 2025, a decline of over 40%; RT-Mart also fell from 88.134 billion yuan to 63.442 billion yuan, a drop of nearly 30%.

Data recently released by NielsenIQ confirms this trend: in the first four months of 2026, offline sales of FMCG food fell 7.1% year-on-year. Among them, hypermarkets declined 17.1%, while supermarkets, small supermarkets, modern trade, grocery stores, and mother-and-baby stores all declined, with only convenience stores seeing a slight increase of 2%.

Source: Nielsen

Wen Zhibing, initiator of the China Beverage Channel Service Provider Alliance, also told Pin Yin Hui: "This year, it's not just the retail end; distributors doing water and beverage business are finding it even harder." He said that 70% of beverage distributors are seeing their business shrink this year, especially those with revenue below 50 million yuan, where 90% are experiencing declines.

However, despite most channels and retailers struggling, Pin Yin Hui still sees new retail formats like Hema, Pangdonglai, Sam's Club, and even Tao Xiaopang and Xianfeng Life racing ahead; channel distributors like Zhengzhou Longting Trading, Shandong Jiyou Supply Chain, and Sichuan Wanrun Zehua are growing their businesses larger.

After reviewing these growth cases, Pin Yin Hui found a common feature: trend-driven product assortments—that is, having a product system that other retail enterprises and channel distributors lack or find scarce.

Why Most Businesses Are Struggling Now

To understand why most terminal store owners or retail enterprises are finding it increasingly difficult, we must first see an essence: How did our growth come about in the past?

In the past, brands (manufacturers) produced goods, distributors acted as agents, purchasers or secondary wholesalers took goods, and finally they were distributed to terminals and reached consumers. At that time, product selection relied on experience, restocking followed trends, and product sell-through relied on the "pseudo-scarcity of goods" caused by insufficient productivity—it wasn't that consumers didn't want to buy other things, but that they had no choice (few products and few channels).

But now it's completely different.

On the production side, there is overcapacity, with more and more brands and products, giving consumers an extremely rich array of choices. Previously, one consumer could only see 10 beverages in a store; now, one consumer has 100 different options.

On the retail side, some enterprises have begun to "disintermediate," directly sourcing from manufacturers, leading to a batch of distributors who originally served retail channels becoming "unemployed"; other enterprises learn from Hema and Pangdonglai to create private labels, cutting off another portion of distributor business.

On the channel side, new channels such as e-commerce, bulk snack retail, instant retail, and community group buying continuously divert consumers, further impacting traditional distributors, supermarkets, convenience stores, and grocery stores.

But besides these objective factors that are hard to change, for most terminal stores and retail enterprises, an aging product assortment is the main reason for declining sales.

Currently, consumer demands are increasingly diverse, with health-oriented, scenario-based, lightweight, and emotional value becoming mainstream: in the morning, they want to drink a bottle of millet yogurt to fill up, and casually buy a coffee to refresh; in the afternoon, they use sugar-free tea as a "water substitute"; when dampness is heavy, they drink red bean and coix seed water; when weak, they buy Liuwei Dihuang drink; staying up late, they drink energy drinks; when exercising, they buy electrolyte water or coconut water...

These increasingly segmented needs make consumers more targeted in their beverage choices. And once a store doesn't have the products they want, it's hard to generate purchases and repeat purchases.

Wen Zhibing told Pin Yin Hui: "Except for leading chain supermarkets and convenience stores, the product assortments of most channels are lagging behind." In lower-tier markets, he saw that most terminal stores still only carry products from Kangshifu, Uni-President, Wahaha, Nongfu Spring, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo, with the only brands that fit consumption trends being Genki Forest and Oriental Leaf.

Source: Xiaohongshu user @布丁🍮

In contrast, all channels that perform well have beverage assortments that not only better fit consumption trends but also update extremely quickly.

Whether it's Hema, Tao Xiaopang, Sam's Club, Pangdonglai, or Xianfeng Life, their beverage category structures always keep up with trends: first-tier brand products account for less than 20%, 30% are private label (PB) products, and the other half are trend brands like Lemon Republic, Shuanglu Shuang, Haowangshui, and Guozi Shule. Moreover, their shelves iterate extremely fast, with 50% of the display space replaced with new products every three months.

Therefore, combining these successful cases, the China Beverage Channel Service Provider Alliance believes: All channel product assortments are worth redoing.

Restructuring Product Assortments to Restart Growth

But the word "redo" is easier said than done.

Since "product assortment" is the answer to counter-trend growth, why can't the impacted terminal stores replicate the success of Sam's Club and Hema? Why are even distributors, who connect both ends, struggling on the transformation path?

It's not that they don't want to, but that they can't. For most terminal owners, they don't have the strength to directly connect with brands and factories like leading supermarkets do, nor can they afford the consequences of product selection errors leading to slow-moving inventory. Therefore, they can only rely on distributors to optimize their product categories.

On the other hand, the living space of traditional distributors is being rapidly compressed: top-tier big brands have transparent profits and severe internal competition, making them unprofitable; niche new brands have unknown risks and single products can't support the market, so they dare not enter; long-term reliance on single-product sourcing and scattered distribution, lacking a combination mindset, ultimately leads to a dilemma of "no profit, no growth, no barriers," reducing them to mere "transport middlemen."

Source: Xiaohongshu user @智少

To escape this dilemma, Pin Yin Hui has seen some distributors begin to try "assembling product assortments"—packaging products from multiple brands and categories together, hoping to provide terminals with richer choices. However, they quickly discovered that simply combining a bunch of products doesn't solve the problem.

If the product assortment still contains those aging, homogenized beverages that don't meet current consumer needs, even with more SKUs and larger display space, consumers still won't buy. The real breakthrough is not in the action of "assembling a product assortment" itself, but in "what kind of product assortment to assemble."

Mr. Xie, founder of Chengdu Wanrun Zehua Trading, said: "The biggest difference between them and other distributors is that their product assortment is more complete, more diverse, newer, and more in line with consumption trends." In his view, a product assortment is not a simple pile of products, but a product system that precisely matches current consumers' needs for health, scenarios, lightweight, and emotional value.

It's worth noting that this behavior of "assembling trend-driven product assortments" precisely fits the development needs of a large number of innovative categories and growth-stage brands. They don't lack good products—quite the opposite, many new brands precisely hit consumers' segmented needs for health, function, and emotion.

But in the past, it was extremely difficult for them to enter terminal stores as single brands: shelves were long occupied by first-tier brands, and even if they managed to get in, it was hard to get prime display positions, often squeezed into corners or bottom shelves, surrounded by the product matrices of giants like Kangshifu, Nongfu Spring, and Coca-Cola, so consumers simply didn't notice them.

Without bargaining chips and unable to sustain terminal maintenance, many good products naturally died out in this "encirclement."

The emergence of trend-driven product assortments provides these innovative brands with a new path to break through: no longer fighting alone, but entering as a "product assortment combination." By integrating into a complete trend-driven product assortment, they no longer rely on single-product negotiations; good displays and positions can be obtained through the overall bargaining power of the assortment.

This points precisely to the true core of the new era's beverage channels. Competition is no longer about distribution capability or financial strength; the only core barrier is the ability to assemble "trend-driven product assortments."

Take Zhengzhou Longting Trading as an example. It started from a traditional agency business and now supplies more than 1,000 supermarket channels nationwide, becoming a well-known water and beverage service provider. It did only one thing: providing supermarkets with a complete set of trend-driven water and beverage product assortments, rather than just promoting a single brand's products.

Through Longting Trading, customers can not only quickly assemble all beverage categories that fit consumption trends on the market, but also quickly build a complete product assortment covering first-tier, second-tier, and third-tier brands, including trend beverages like sugar-free tea, electrolyte water, Chinese-style health drinks, and NFC juices, based on the local consumer demographics and spending power of the supermarket.

As a result, within just a few years, Longting Trading became the core water and beverage supplier for many supermarkets, maintaining about 30% growth in the water and beverage segment over the past three years, with most profits coming from the overall output of trend-driven water and beverage product assortments.

Xi Jie, co-founder of Pin Yin Hui, summarized this: Outstanding distributors are no longer product middlemen, but product service providers and growth enablers for terminal channels.

They can combine "high turnover, high gross margin, high adaptability, and stable price system" exclusive trend-driven product assortments based on regional markets, terminal formats, and consumption habits, helping terminals solve sell-through problems while solidifying their own channel influence and widening the gap with peers.

Therefore, Pin Yin Hui sees that "seeking growth from trend-driven product assortments" is a real transformation happening at the channel end. In the view of excellent channel service providers, without restructuring trend-driven product assortments, there is no future growth. Whether for distributors or retailers, growth today must come from trend-driven product assortments, not so-called single brands.

The essence of seeking growth from trend-driven product assortments is to completely overthrow the "outdated brand shelf" and build a "precise consumer demand shelf." Eliminate inefficient and slow-moving products, integrate trend and innovative products, and replace single-product bulk distribution with a scientific combination of "wide categories, narrow products," so that every displayed product at the terminal precisely matches user needs, thereby thoroughly solving the industry pain points of inventory backlog, weak sell-through, and chaotic price systems.

2026: Seek Growth from Trend-Driven Product Assortments

In the beverage industry, many people know they "need to change," but very few can actually "change."

Thousands of terminal owners and small and medium distributors lack not awareness, but methods, resources, and organizational strength that can directly deliver trend-driven product assortments to them.

And this is exactly what Pin Yin Hui has been doing for the past 14 years.

We didn't start "assembling product assortments" just today. For 14 years, Pin Yin Hui has focused on one thing: two-way connection between brands and channels in the beverage industry.

To date, we have established deep cooperation with more than 5,000 beverage brands, of which over 80% are trend brands that precisely hit the needs for health, scenarios, lightweight, and emotional value—including emerging forces like Lemon Republic, Haowangshui, Guozi Shule, and Shuanglu Shuang, as well as a large number of innovative category brands.

This means when others are still searching the world for "good products," Pin Yin Hui already has a brand pool covering all categories and trends—sugar-free tea, electrolyte water, Chinese-style health drinks, NFC juices, functional drinks, plant-based drinks... all the categories consumers want now but are absent from traditional shelves can be quickly matched within Pin Yin Hui's ecosystem.

In 2026, Pin Yin Hui will comprehensively restructure the industry ecosystem, breaking the fragmented pattern of each player fighting alone, and bringing brands, distributors, terminal channels, and industry service providers into the same growth loop.

We are no longer a simple supply-demand matching platform, but the core organization for beverage industry product assortment growth. Through organized, systematic, and normalized operations, we unify product assortment standards, integrate quality resources, and consolidate industry strength, so that all partners can share trend-driven product assortments, channel resources, and growth dividends.

1. 2026 Beverage Product Assortment Restructuring Selection Fair

Taking each regional market as a unit, focusing on local consumption characteristics, terminal formats, and channel pain points, we carry out targeted regional product assortment restructuring empowerment. We teach distributors hand-in-hand how to analyze the market, screen categories, match wide categories with narrow products, stabilize price systems, and create high-turnover, high-profit exclusive product combinations suitable for the local market.

2. 2026 Pin Yin Hui Innovative Beverage Theme Exhibition

Relying on the industry events of the Spring and Autumn Sugar & Wine Fairs, with Pin Yin Hui's full-domain trend-driven product assortments as the core, we open multi-to-multi precise product assortment restructuring matchmaking. On one side, we gather innovative categories and trend brands from across the country; on the other, we connect precise channel distributors nationwide.

This allows brands to leverage organizational momentum for one-stop efficient channel expansion and market placement; and allows distributors to avoid blind product selection, once and for all equipping themselves with a complete, high-quality product assortment that fits industry trends, adapts to terminals, has stable prices, and sufficient profits, achieving efficient breakthroughs and concentrated growth at the exhibition.

3. 2026 China Beverage Industry Conference

We release annual beverage category development trends, iterate new trend-driven product assortment standards, and lead the direction of national channel product assortment restructuring from an industry height.

This ensures all partners not only have product assortments that can make money now, but can also plan ahead for future tracks and seize new category dividends, achieving both short-term profitability and long-term layout, making "seeking growth from product assortments" have methods, trends, and a future.

In 2026, Pin Yin Hui will use monthly selection fairs, two theme exhibitions a year, and an annual industry conference to turn "seeking growth from trend-driven product assortments" into a certain growth path for every distributor, every terminal store, and every trend brand.

Final Thoughts

In the past, the beverage business was full of uncertainty: hit products depended on luck, making money depended on trends, and stability depended on opportunity. Some became popular overnight with a single product, while others followed trends and suffered continuous losses; business success or failure was entirely accidental.

But the ultimate competition in the consumer era is the competition of systems, product assortments, and organizations.

The core of Pin Yin Hui's 2026 Product Assortment Restructuring Plan is to end random growth and start certain win-win cooperation.

Based on 14 years of industry accumulation, with organizational unity as the carrier and trend-driven product assortments as the core: empower every distributor to develop professional product assortment capabilities, escape the middleman dilemma, and firmly hold channel profits; empower every innovative brand to break through with organizational strength, efficiently land in channels, and continuously occupy the market; empower every terminal channel to restructure high-quality product assortments, achieve stable sell-through, and long-term operation.

On June 30, Pin Yin Hui will launch the 2026 Beverage Product Assortment Restructuring Selection Fair (Zhengzhou Station). At that time, we will build a gathering place for high-quality trend water and beverage products for distributors in the Henan region, covering this year's hot four major trend product assortments: "category+", light functional, new alcoholic drinks, and private labels.

At the same time, during the Nanjing Autumn Sugar & Wine Fair from October 10-14, Pin Yin Hui will also hold the "2026 Pin Yin Hui Autumn Innovative Beverage Theme Exhibition" around these four trends. We welcome all trend brands to join Pin Yin Hui in assembling a good product assortment, providing distributors and channels with more convenient, efficient, and terminal-competitive trend-driven product assortments.