Garden Tips
Yuexiu Dairy: Does it rely not on established players, but on bold rapid expansion?
Last week, Beverage Marketing published an article about the milk brand Xie Tiandi, attracting numerous reader comments. As readers debated why Xie Tiandi had such a strong start followed by a steady decline, another dairy brand under the Yuexiu Group was also brought up for discussion.
"Is this brand from the same company as that scallion and ginger flavored milk?"
That comment soon drew a flood of follow-up replies. It seems that compared with Xie Tiandi, which positions itself as a high-end brand, consumers are far more interested in Fuxing, a brand often seen making bold, erratic market moves.
Some netizens even commented bluntly:“The only dairy brand Yuexiu has done really well is Fuxing.”
Such high praise? Let’s take a closer look at the whole story.
01 Shared Origin, Different Fates
First, let’s briefly sort out the relationship between these brands.
Yuexiu Group operates across multiple business sectors. It takes finance, real estate and transportation as its pillar industries, and food, healthcare and high-end manufacturing as emerging growth industries, forming a 3+3 industrial layout.
Yuexiu Dairy is one of the core business platforms in the Group’s food sector. It owns four major brands: Huishan Dairy, Fuxing Dairy, Great Wall Dairy and Wuyang Ice Cream, forming a nationwide layout summarized asFuxing in the south, Great Wall in central China, and Huishan in the north.
Yuexiu Dairy’s development is marked by its deep financial resources and aggressive expansion strategy.
It has built a national dairy landscape mainly through acquiring and integrating time-honored dairy enterprises.Huishan Dairy, originally a century-old brand based in Shenyang, was acquired and restructured by Yuexiu Group for 3 billion yuan in 2020, focusing on the Northeast market.Fuxing is a time-honored local brand in Guangzhou, an inherent dairy asset of Yuexiu Group, targeting the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.Great Wall Dairy mainly covers the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
As for the much-discussed brand Xie Tiandi, it is under Yuexiu Huishan Dairy. To some extent, it was tasked with achieving 10 billion yuan in annual sales by 2025.
However, the brand’s recent price cuts not only signal the collapse of its high-end positioning, but also make the 10-billion-yuan sales target seem increasingly unattainable.
The massive brand exposure it poured huge sums into has vanished like sand blown away by the wind, leaving no trace behind. In the comment section of that article, many netizens said they had barely heard of the brand.
As one door closes, another opens. By contrast, Fuxing’s quirky, headline-grabbing moves have successfully etched its name into consumers’ minds.
Admittedly, consumers mostly refer to it casually as that ginger-scallion milk, that poached chicken milk, or that soy sauce chicken milk.
Still, you have to admit this unconventional strategy has struck a chord with the public.
Back in January this year, a new product quietly hit the shelves: Ginger-Scallion Poached Chicken Flavored Milk. It sold out across all online channels within just five days after launch. Related topics quickly went viral across social media and were even cited as a consumption trend case in the Two Sessions coverage.
Three months later, the second offering in the same lineup — Rose Soy Sauce Chicken Flavored Milk — was launched, repeating the phenomenal popularity of its predecessor.
Market performance shows that this bold gamble has yielded far better-than-expected returns. According to disclosure from its parent company Fuxing Dairy, both products sold out in a short time. More importantly, 60% of buyers were young consumers aged 18 to 35, and among them, another 60% were first-time purchasers of Fuxing products.
This means the quirky chicken-flavored milk has successfully helped the century-old Fuxing brand build a connection with Generation Z consumers.
02 What Do Consumers Really Want?
On one side, high-end brand storytelling has lost its appeal; on the other, bizarre and novelty marketing has gone viral.
Two vastly different strategies have led to completely opposite outcomes.
At this point, it is hard not to feel a sense of regret. Brands spend heavily building a high-end image, yet fail to resonate with consumers. By contrast, embracing quirky, offbeat ideas easily wins public acceptance.
Behind this phenomenon lies a market mismatch shaped by two different eras.
Bai Ying, who led the branding of Xie Tiandi, once created Telunsu, a phenomenal blockbuster dairy product. Having reaped huge dividends from high-end brand storytelling, she attempted to copy the same formula for Xie Tiandi. Yet she overlooked one crucial fact: times have changed completely.
Over the years, consumers have long become disenchanted with those pompous, high-end brand narratives. Phrases like “a gift from nature” are little more than a blatant excuse to justify premium pricing.
Rather than such empty, grandiose marketing gimmicks, modern consumers increasingly favor brands that show a genuine, down-to-earth human touch.
This is exactly why Fuxing’s quirky chicken-flavored milk became a hit. On the surface, it seems nothing more than a fleeting novelty that attracts curious buyers; fundamentally, it caters to young people’s demand for cultural identity and social currency. By combining dairy drinks with Cantonese signature dishes, the product captures public attention while retaining strong regional characteristics.
Of course, if Fuxing rests on its laurels and goes no further, it will only capitalize on short-term traffic and fleeting popularity, eventually ending up the same as those one-hit-wonder novelty beverages.
Fortunately, the brand has not been blinded by temporary popularity; instead, it has demonstrated a commitment to long-term development.
For Fuxing, the quirky chicken-flavored milk series merely serves as a well-timed traffic entry point. As a century-old dairy enterprise, it cannot rely solely on novelty flavors for sustained growth.
Accordingly, Fuxing Dairy has successively launched new products such as Five-finger Peach Milk and Ginger Poured Milk. Compared with the chicken-flavored milk line, these new offerings are far more conventional while still retaining strong local Cantonese characteristics.
Five-finger peach is an essential ingredient for Cantonese soup boiling and boasts certain health-preserving benefits. Ginger poured milk, a classic Cantonese dessert, needs no introduction — it delivers a fresh taste experience and enjoys high consumer acceptance.
Looking at its overall layout, Fuxing’s strategy is quite clear. As a regional dairy brand unable to compete with national giants in scale, it has chosen to break into segmented tracks and build differentiated competitive barriers rooted in local features.
The pioneering chicken-flavored milk, health-oriented five-finger peach milk, and ginger poured milk inspired by classic Cantonese desserts together forge a one-of-a-kind Cantonese-flavored brand identity exclusive to Fuxing Dairy.
For a time-honored dairy brand rooted in Guangdong for over 160 years, deeply exploring local Cantonese flavors is undoubtedly a more realistic path than engaging in cutthroat homogeneous competition with industry giants.
You must have felt a strong sense of familiarity by now.
This marketing strategy seems oddly familiar.
Fuxing Dairy has clearly learned its tricks from Tianjin Haihe.
As one of the earliest pioneers of novelty flavored milk in China, Tianjin Haihe shot to fame with its debut Jianbing Guozi flavored milk.By virtue of differentiated product positioning, it broke free from the competitive squeeze of Mengniu and Yili, building a nationwide brand image of being “playful and creative” in consumers’ minds.
Fuxing has obviously grasped the core of this strategy. It integrated the food memories deeply embedded in Cantonese people’s DNA into dairy products, striking a precise emotional resonance with local consumers and arousing the willingness to try among consumers from other regions.
These new young consumers are exactly the steady stream of new audiences that Fuxing has long been striving to attract.
03 Closing Remarks
Essentially, this strategy seizes the transformation of contemporary consumption logic.In the past, consumers chose milk mainly for nutrition, brand reputation and brand stories. Nowadays, young consumers also pursue emotional value and social value.
Fuxing’s wisdom lies in that it does not take novelty as its sole selling point.It uses bold, unconventional creative products to gain viral traffic, then retains the audience with locally featured products rooted in regional culture, turning traffic into genuine brand loyalists.
It reaps the dividends of online popularity, while never abandoning its fundamental footing as a century-old dairy enterprise.
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