How adept are the Chinese at eating? This is evident from their ability to handle tricky ingredients. The feet of poultry and livestock are rich in keratin, tough and chewy when unprocessed, and most nationalities are at a loss with them. But in the hands of Chinese chefs, the feet of pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens, ducks, and geese become a feast that includes pig's trotters with ginger and vinegar, scallion-braised tendons, spicy lamb trotters, tiger-skin chicken feet, mustard duck webs, and abalone sauce goose webs. Not only are they prepared with skill, but their origins and flavor profiles never repeat. With the support of the modern food industry, many dishes have transformed from main courses into snacks, creating China's broadest and most diverse snack market, with a total scale exceeding 1.4 trillion yuan. In 2024 alone, the market for pre-packaged meat snacks reached 290.2 billion yuan. However, in the "Food & Drink 2024" value report by the British brand valuation agency Brand Finance, only two Chinese dairy companies, Mengniu and Yili, made the TOP 10, while the snack category was dominated by international food giants. The international influence of China's once-weak high-end manufacturing is gradually expanding; yet, under the reputation of being "the best at eating," the snack track continues to witness the embarrassing situation of the tea circle, where "70,000 Chinese tea companies cannot rival one British Lipton." Nielsen analysis points out that the first category in pre-packaged meat snacks is chicken feet. The Chinese consume 33.6 billion chicken feet annually, accounting for over 80% of global chicken feet production. Among them, chicken feet snacks with higher added value are increasing at a double-digit rate year by year. As the market potential is fully realized, there is still room for several times expansion in the future. The broad mass base and huge market scale have brought rapid growth to leading enterprises that seize the opportunity. Taking Wang Xiaolu as an example, from 2019 to 2024, it achieved nearly a hundredfold increase in annual revenue, becoming one of the fastest-growing brands in leisure snacks. Chinese flavors have the industrial potential to nurture world-class food giants. Why can't domestic snacks bring a "Chinese shock" to the world's taste buds? What are the qualities of becoming a snack king? What snacks do the Chinese love most? According to comprehensive snack consumption market reports from multiple institutions, the top three categories of Chinese snack consumption are nuts and roasted seeds, puffed food, and braised snacks. These "TOP3" are all trillion-yuan tracks with double-digit compound annual growth rates. The throne of puffed snacks has long been occupied by Lay's potato chips, and the nut and roasted seeds category is also full of strong competitors. The braised flavor track started relatively late but is growing rapidly, relying on the roots of Chinese food culture, with a growth rate as high as 18%. Among them, the category with the most potential for sudden emergence is tiger-skin chicken feet. Similar to light and crispy potato chips with only a faint potato aroma, tiger-skin chicken feet have a rich texture and no particular flavor tendency, making them an excellent carrier for various flavors. Tiger-skin chicken feet are full of flavor but low in satiety, providing a sense of satisfaction that is "eaten but not really eaten," making them a "natural holy vessel" for snack ingredients. At the same time, tiger-skin chicken feet are meat-based, and compared to puffed foods mainly composed of starch and plant protein products like spicy strips and dried tofu, they can provide more emotional value of "eating meat." The success of Lay's, the king of potato chips, lies in maximizing the advantages of a single product while continuously innovating, capturing consumer minds with strong single products and meeting a larger market with ever-changing flavors. Lay's sells 211 flavors in China and launches more than 30 seasonal and regional limited flavors each year. Similarly, chicken feet can also play such a "carrier" role. Steamed chicken feet with black bean sauce is a must-order dish in Cantonese morning tea. In the encyclopedic work "The Cantonese Chef's Treasure Book" compiled by Cantonese cuisine master Pan Yingjun, there are also five or six other names such as Baiyun chicken feet, crystal chicken feet, fish-flavored chicken feet, and salty fragrant chicken feet. Heading north through Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and then west through Chongqing into Sichuan, the "food map" of chicken feet spreads out, including grilling, frying, braising, stewing, and more. Youyou Foods became a listed company by selling pickled pepper chicken feet, and Wang Xiaolu, which dominates with tiger-skin chicken feet, sold over 1.2 billion bags in six years. Wang Xiaolu's strategy head stated that for braised flavors, taste is the essence and spices are the soul. Chinese braised flavors have different schools such as Sichuan braised, sauce braised, and Cantonese braised, and consumers in different regions have different flavor preferences. The ultimate imagination of braised flavors lies in the expansion of flavor profiles. "Tiger-skin chicken feet are a versatile carrier. In addition to popular classic flavors like braised, spicy, and mala, Wang Xiaolu has completed extensive exploration and product reserves in replicating regional representative flavors and innovating by fusing creative ingredients with tiger-skin chicken feet. The profoundness of Chinese food culture provides us with endless product creativity inspiration." However, tiger-skin chicken feet still face some problems on the road to becoming a snack king. Traditional braising processes cause differences in taste, texture, aroma, and appearance of each batch, which is not conducive to large-scale and standardized production. To become a national snack, being delicious is only the first step. How to control every production link to achieve stable flavor and consistent quality is a bigger challenge. Wang Xiaolu, which aspires to be the national chicken feet brand, attaches great importance to this aspect. Wang Xiaolu's tiger-skin chicken feet use the innovative process of "quantitative braising + 12-hour cold marinating" to replace traditional hot braising, solving the industry problems of flavor consistency and large-scale production. The person in charge of Wang Xiaolu's factory told Huxiu that the Chuzhou super factory has the industry's first standardized production line designed specifically for tiger-skin chicken feet. The entire process uses 20 sets of automated equipment, achieving fully automatic temperature control, time control, and quantification in the entire "frying-rehydration-cold marinating" process. This not only eliminates flavor fluctuations, ensures production stability and controllability, but also greatly reduces the risk of microbial contamination during production, ensuring that high-quality products can be continuously delivered to consumers. Focusing solely on the tiger-skin chicken feet segment, Wang Xiaolu's annual performance grew nearly 30% in 2024, maintaining double-digit growth for six consecutive years. It not only created its own growth miracle but also continuously raised the ceiling of the category. This is undoubtedly a reflection of the potential of the tiger-skin chicken feet category and also confirms the correctness of the "ultimate single product + flavor innovation" route. If breakthroughs can be made in flavor expansion and production standardization, scale, and digitalization, the chicken feet track may indeed produce a world-class snack king in the future. How to satisfy "I want to eat now"? The rapid development of e-commerce has nurtured a number of "new consumption" snack brands that grew rapidly by relying on traffic. Currently, the growth rate of e-commerce channels in the snack industry is still considerable, but offline channels are still, and increasingly, a battleground. Snacks have the attribute of instant gratification. Relying solely on e-commerce channels cannot satisfy the impulse consumption demand of "I want to eat now." Even in the era of highly developed e-commerce, the vast majority of snack purchase decisions still occur offline. According to the "2025 China Snack Industry Report," 80% of snack sales channels come from offline. Retail channels themselves are also undergoing accelerated transformation. Snack discount stores are springing up like mushrooms; new-type supermarkets such as Sam's Club and Pangdonglai are leading the new trend of "immersive consumption" offline; instant retail has expanded the business opportunities of traditional supermarkets and also made young people, whose consumption behavior has already been shaped by food delivery and errand services, eat snacks faster and more conveniently. The era of omni-channel has begun, and the ability of snack brands to fight the "ground war" offline has become unprecedentedly important. For FMCG food and beverage products, "ground war" capability is decisive. Omni-channel capability, especially the most difficult offline channels, brings crucial stability to enterprises. Taking functional drinks as an example, when Huabin Group initially promoted Red Bull, it relied on salesmen going down to highway service areas and small shops along national roads one by one, pushing products into the sales terminals closest to the target customer group. These "capillaries" painstakingly opened became Huabin's greatest wealth. When "Red Bull" encountered trademark disputes and was removed from e-commerce and KA channels, it was the inconspicuous community supermarkets and "mom-and-pop stores" that supported this star product from collapsing. The "challenger" Dongpeng Special Drink, on the one hand, made this close combat more extreme and rapid, and on the other hand, through digitalization, placed millions of terminals under a clear data dashboard, making sales feedback and strategic decisions more precise, ultimately achieving a comeback against Red Bull. Lay's is a master of the "shelf war." Enter any supermarket, and you will see Lay's small red labels piled into a mountain in the most prominent position, with dozens of colorful flavors occupying an entire shelf column, leaving consumers with no other puffed snacks in sight. It is with this simple and "violent" channel capability that Lay's monopolizes more than half of China's potato chip market share, firmly ranking first in market share. For brands that have benefited from e-commerce dividends, making up their minds to fight the "ground war" is difficult but absolutely correct. Wang Xiaolu started online, and its advantage in online channels has never been challenged. However, the founder still insisted on investing in the offline battlefield as early, as quickly, and as unswervingly as possible. Since starting to lay out offline in the second half of 2020, relying on its huge advantages in product innovation and brand mindshare, Wang Xiaolu quickly completed the penetration and layout of KA, convenience stores, new retail, and snack discount channels. It now covers more than 230,000 terminals in over 300 cities across the country, and offline sales now account for more than 70% of its operations. However, to become a national snack brand, it is usually necessary to penetrate millions of offline retail channels, and improve operational efficiency through digital system construction and lean terminal shelf management. Currently, the meat snack area in offline supermarkets still shows a situation of scattered categories and brands, with low market concentration. High-momentum brands like Wang Xiaolu have huge opportunities offline. "If our penetration and control capability of offline channels could be like Lay's or Mondelez, reaching more than 2 million terminals, what scale would that be?" In the view of Wang Xiaolu, which has ranked first in national tiger-skin chicken feet sales for six consecutive years, the future of tiger-skin chicken feet is still a vast blue ocean. Young people who "eat according to the occasion" The short board of brand power is another reason why the Chinese, who know best how to eat, lack world-class snacks. Neglecting brand building leads to fighting separately and low-price involution; supermarkets are largely occupied by white-label products, and social networks are full of searches for "cheap alternatives." In such an environment, it is naturally difficult to emerge world-class snacks like Lay's. Conversely, snack brands also have the responsibility to show consumers what they are good at. Besides price, what else can they rely on to capture consumers' hearts? In fact, the significance of snacks has never been limited to the small bite of "eating." More importantly, it is about the emotional value of self-comfort generated through eating snacks, and the "social currency" effect of building emotional connections. In this regard, the emotional added value that brands give to snacks is difficult for white-label products to replace. Eating according to the occasion—what snack brand or category to eat on what occasion—is becoming a new "exquisite" for young consumers. Internationally renowned snack brands have always focused on building brand recognition through fun, interactivity, and "happiness" attributes. Oreo's "twist, lick, dunk" strongly binds happiness and fun to the brand positioning, breaking through the family scene of parent-child interaction. Lay's potato chips constantly refresh their regional limited series, doing fine "knife work" on the vast food map. Friends and colleagues sharing new flavors of Lay's chips has become a good way to open relationships and enhance friendship, echoing the brand's positioning of "sharing happiness." Beyond "stunts," identifying target groups and consumption scenarios is also a major focus of food and beverage brand building. Still taking functional drinks as an example, when Dongpeng was in close combat with Red Bull, it chose to enter from the scene of night shift workers and night drivers, achieving rapid expansion. Brands like Monster, Lehu, and Zhanma have established brand moats of billions in scale around scenarios such as trendy sports, basketball, or e-sports, demonstrating the power of precise positioning. Chicken feet have the characteristic of "small bites and slow chewing," which helps pass the time and brings ample fun and satisfaction; tiger-skin chicken feet have thick meat and richer texture layers, especially suitable for nibbling during moments of craving relief, fatigue relief, chatting, and companionship. In response to these characteristics, the brand strategy Wang Xiaolu chose is: closely grasp the category characteristics of chicken feet, focus on the "drama-watching" scenario, differentiate content marketing, and strengthen mindshare occupation. The "Snack Industry User Insight Report" released by Xiaohongshu shows that the most common scenario for consumers to eat snacks is while watching dramas (65.2%), and the first factor in choosing snacks is "enhancing happiness and pleasure." The main group of drama-watchers is precisely women aged 18-35, who have the strongest consumption willingness. Starting in 2023, Wang Xiaolu began exploring communication with target consumers through big drama placements; in 2024, it fully focused on the drama-watching scenario, adopting a combined placement model of exclusive dramas and classic dramas, using catchy ads to make tiger-skin chicken feet sweep across the four major platforms "iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, and Mango TV," with a total of 214 dramas and 32 variety shows placed throughout the year, achieving an annual exposure of over 4.2 billion. Through precise penetration of consumption scenarios, the concept of "eat Wang Xiaolu tiger-skin chicken feet while watching dramas" has taken firm root in consumers' minds. This not only enhances brand recognition but also brings more topicality and social value. A relevant person in charge of Wang Xiaolu's brand told Huxiu that Wang Xiaolu's current unaided top-of-mind brand mention rate (the percentage of consumers who can blurt out the first brand for a certain type of product without thinking) can reach 15%. Compared to Qiaqia in the melon seed and roasted nut category, and Weilong in the spicy strip and konjac snack category, Wang Xiaolu still has significant room for development. China's trillion-yuan snack market is a boundless blue ocean for any brand. In 2024, Lay's alone, relying solely on the potato chip category, made over 13 billion yuan in the Chinese market. Oreo once "did not adapt" in China, but after adjusting its channel and marketing strategies, it successfully made China its second-largest global market, helping this classic biscuit sell over 400 billion pieces worldwide. Yet domestic enterprises have so far failed to create a world-class snack brand of the same scale and influence, which is indeed a major regret for China's food and beverage industry. But the emergence of world-class snacks is indeed not achieved overnight; it is a comprehensive cultivation of three major capabilities: product, channel, and brand. As the meat snack most beloved by the Chinese who know best how to eat, the tiger-skin chicken feet category, represented by Wang Xiaolu, has product characteristics similar to potato chips. Backed by the inexhaustible flavor resources of Chinese cuisine, and with continuous progress in product, channel, supply chain, and brand building, in today's still-low industry concentration, this category may indeed have the opportunity to produce a Chinese "Lay's" of our own. Cover image | Visual China