High loss, heavy investment, long supply chain. Fresh products are considered the "most difficult category to digitize," yet their high repeat purchase rate can help e-commerce platforms increase user activity and stickiness. Therefore, e-commerce platforms are always engaged in fierce competition with the mantra "he who wins fresh products wins the world," which is also a challenge that high-level entrepreneurs repeatedly face and overcome.

A large number of high-quality agricultural products in China are still at the "industrial belt brand" stage. Especially for fruits, whose supply is highly susceptible to seasonal and other factors, building a brand is even more challenging. Among the fruit brands that can be remembered by name, Joyvio is a typical representative.

In this report, Yicai Business School has extracted various sub-segments within the fresh category, such as poultry and meat, fruits and vegetables, and aquatic products, and summarized three new paths for fresh branding:

1. Effective Storytelling | Creating a founder's IP to build trust relationships (using the brand "Tanji" under the Ai Jiankang Group as an example).

2. Effective Private Label | Leveraging the established fresh channel brand from direct procurement to delivery (using the self-owned black pork brand "Heizhuan Shijia" of Dingdong Maicai as an example).

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3. Effective Breeding | Entering special categories and creating a vertical category IP based on the scarcity of the variety (using "Jiajing" as an example).

When building a fresh brand, the company founded in 2012 has taken an industrial reshaping path: starting from blueberries, which were still considered "niche fruits" at the time, and educating the consumer market from scratch; acquiring the largest fresh channel merchant in the country, Xinrongmao, and starting its digital transformation from scratch; owning 30,000 acres of blueberry, apple, and cherry planting bases; and building a world-class advanced fruit industry chain...

This modern agricultural and food industry group, invested in by Legend Holdings, has built a channel and category advantage for fruits ahead of many brands, with several major categories such as blueberries, durians, cherries, and kiwis holding the top market share. Yicai Business School interviewed Wang Haiwei, President of Joyvio's Fruit Business Group, to sort out Joyvio's brand strategy, channel strategy, and how to ensure stable supply.

Brand Strategy

Starting with high-quality blueberries to shape the brand.Compared to the annual growth rate of 3-5% in China's fruit production, blueberries have been the true "sales champions" in the fruit market in recent years, with an annual growth rate in demand reaching 40% over the past five years. In the first quarter of this year, the cumulative sales volume of blueberries on online e-commerce platforms (JD.com, Tmall, and Taobao) was approximately 1.2 million units, with a sequential increase of over 300%.

The significant increase in blueberry consumption stems from the expansion of domestic blueberry cultivation areas and the enhanced competitiveness of domestic varieties in recent years. From the supply side, China began to introduce blueberries in the 1980s, and before that, only wild blueberries were found in places like Heilongjiang in the northeast, marking the beginning of the commercial cultivation of blueberries in China. In 2012, Joyvio invested in the large-scale and commercial cultivation of blueberries, ushering in a new phase of large-scale cultivation in northern China (such as Shandong and Liaoning), which led to many enterprises following suit. By 2023, with Joyvio's blueberry bases, factories, and sales achieving comprehensive digitalization, and more enterprises and farmers investing in substrate potted cultivation models, the cultivation scale in Yunnan has rapidly expanded. The mountain blueberries from Yunnan have become the representative of "high-end blueberries" and have even become a global benchmark for the blueberry industry, attracting high attention, research, and investment in the global fruit industry.

From the consumer side, the ability to purchase high-quality domestic blueberries naturally means that consumers will not wait an extra month for imported sea freight. Among them, the "large grain" blueberries with a diameter of 22mm or more and a crisper and sweeter taste can be sold at a price of 95-120 yuan per jin (0.5 kg). Joyvio chose blueberries as the entry category for brand building for the following reasons.

1. Scalable high-quality fruit. The sustainability of a brand comes from the scalability and stable supply of high-quality products. Whether a fruit category can be made into a brand depends not only on the scale of the category but also on the share of "high-quality fruit yield/total yield." With good products, merchants have the foundation and room for brand premium. However, due to the limitations of the development of modern agriculture in China, the high-quality rate of many bulk fruit categories is less than 10%. Taking apples as an example, China's annual apple production is about 47 million tons, with an annual output value of more than 200 billion yuan, but the high-quality apples (including new varieties, high-quality fruits from old varieties in premium production areas) are less than 3 million tons. Nongfu Spring and Chu Orange, which have entered the high-end orange race, have both spent more than a decade in cultivation time and cost, as well as hundreds of millions of yuan in investment costs, but their market share is still less than 1/100 of the citrus market. The main reason is that most domestic apples and citrus fruits are still operated in a non-industrialized manner. In recent years, with the popularization of new varieties and the leadership of leading enterprises in high-quality production areas, domestic apple and citrus brands have also begun to emerge.

The blueberry category, however, is different. The global annual production of blueberries has exceeded 2 million tons, with a value of more than 70 billion yuan, and 60% of them are high-quality fresh fruits that can be considered as high-quality fruits. After more than 40 years of industrialization, blueberries at home and abroad have achieved standardization in planting, screening, transportation, and other aspects, especially with their high planting barriers, making them easier to industrialize.

2. The most storable category among berry fruits. Berry fruits have become the fastest-growing fruit category globally due to their taste and convenience of consumption. However, their delicate nature, high water content, and susceptibility to mechanical damage have hindered their industrial development. Blueberries are one of the most storable categories among berry fruits, with a shelf life far exceeding that of strawberries and other berry fruits. They can be preserved for more than 60 days in a cold chain environment, and blueberries are usually sold in portable packaging of 125g per box, reducing the loss for merchants during transportation. This is one of the driving factors for the rapid industrialization of blueberries. Wang Haiwei predicts that the global sales of blueberries are expected to surpass strawberries and become the largest berry fruit category.

3. High requirements for capital and technology, easy to form barriers, and enterprises are more willing to invest in research and development. Compared to dairy enterprises that have started to build their own farms to ensure the supply of high-quality milk sources, blueberries, due to their high investment (nearly 100,000 yuan per mu for substrate blueberries), high technical barriers, and variety patentization, are naturally mainly grown on an enterprise scale, which further promotes the research and development investment in blueberry varieties and cultivation techniques. The emergence of larger, sweeter, and more storable blueberry varieties ensures the quality of blueberries. With the recognition of blueberry brands such as Joyvio and Yike Berry by consumers, the rapid growth in consumer demand has also driven these blueberry brand merchants to expand their production areas, making the source quality more controllable.

Wang Haiwei told Yicai Business School, "Fruit practitioners are not just porters of nature; the fruit industry has entered a technologically intensive industrial development cycle." Joyvio has gone through four iterations and upgrades from the northern high-bush variety to the southern high-bush variety, from land cultivation to substrate cultivation, from non-patented varieties to patented varieties, and from its own planting heavy asset model to cooperative planting. By variety research and development and model innovation, it has promoted the development of China's blueberry industry and achieved a leading position in the global blueberry industry. Currently, Joyvio's blueberry bases are located in core production areas such as Yunnan, Hubei, Shandong, Liaoning, and Sichuan, with an annual output of more than 20,000 tons and a value of more than 1 billion yuan.

At the same time, in terms of digitalization, Joyvio has set the goal of building a digitalized fruit industry chain from the very beginning. Taking blueberries as an example, it not only focuses on the planting end but also extends to various links in the upstream and downstream of the industry chain. By integrating agricultural production elements with digital technology, it has created a comprehensive digital solution covering fruit variety breeding, planting production, sorting and processing, cold chain storage and distribution, and brand marketing.

After the Joyvio blueberry brand became well-known, Joyvio began to add more categories, and more high-quality and boutique categories such as durian, cherries, and coconut water appeared in front of consumers in the image of the Joyvio brand.Channel Strategy

Mergers and acquisitions and transformation of the largest national fruit supplier

Unlike the "shared supply chain + heavy marketing + development of distributors" approach of new fast-moving consumer goods brands in recent years, due to the wide variety of fruit categories, a single category is difficult to support the expansion of channels. Therefore, fruit channel service providers have become a key aggregation link in the fruit industry chain. After Jiawo laid out the blueberry category, the first key strategic layout was the acquisition of Xinrongmao, the leading domestic fruit channel service provider, in 2015. By leveraging its strong supply chain layout to integrate channel resources, it achieved a "spider web" distribution model.

Xinrongmao has the capability to link global core fruit resources, conducting fruit business with nearly 40 countries and regions such as Thailand, Chile, and New Zealand. It possesses a digitalized cold chain logistics system and more than 30 cold chain logistics centers, with a daily processing capacity of 1 million units. Its omni-channel distribution network covers more than 300 cities in China, over 10,000 supermarkets, and more than 25,000 fruit specialty stores, as well as leading e-commerce platforms, with a daily distribution volume exceeding 3,000 tons.

Based on Xinrongmao's channel advantages of directly supplying supermarkets and fruit specialty stores, the Jiawo brand was able to quickly spread nationwide through offline channels. In addition, Jiawo also integrated the largest national fruit distributor, Qupai, through Xinrongmao, achieving full coverage of the first and second-tier agricultural and sideline product wholesale markets across the country. As the core transit station in product circulation, the agricultural and sideline product wholesale markets scattered throughout the country are the most efficient channels linking the production and sales ends, gathering supplier information and fruit sales big data from various places, helping businesses to make better market judgments. For the fruit industry, which has a high fluctuation in yield and prices, this is an essential link.

Sam's, Ole', Hema, and other high-quality fresh supermarkets are the main sales channels for Jiawo's blueberry products. Based on the strong "ingestion and output" capacity of the agricultural and sideline product wholesale markets, they can not only supplement the supply shortage of supermarkets and fruit direct stores during the peak fruit sales season but also digest sales surplus, helping businesses reduce losses and smooth out supply and demand and price fluctuations. The "Jiawo Flagship Stores" on e-commerce platforms such as JD.com, Tmall Supermarket, and Douyin serve as important display windows for the brand, mainly selling products suitable for long-distance transportation, such as coconuts and frozen durian meat, which can reduce losses to some extent caused by transportation uncertainties.

Facing many categories, different grades, and various channels, Jiawo has achieved full-chain digitization from planting to sales through its self-developed digital system (more than 50 sub-modules), and optimizes the product supply chain through data accumulation and data-driven approaches. The Xinrongmao digital intelligent three-dimensional warehouse located in Bao'an District, Shenzhen, is the world's most advanced automated fruit warehouse. The 38-meter-high warehouse can be fully automated, with the core being Jiawo's creation of underlying data elements for fruit products.

Supply Strategy

Creating and actively meeting consumer demand for high-quality products

The fruit industry is demand-driven by supply; whoever can create high-quality products and achieve stable supply has the opportunity to drive consumption and bring new demands. After validating the brand model with blueberries, Jiawo's brand advantage has extended to scaled high-quality fruit categories such as durian, cherries, and coconuts, forming two sets of supply models: ① For categories such as blueberries, apples, and grapes, a full industry chain from breeding, planting, sorting and packaging to sales has been established domestically; ② For imported fruits such as cherries, durian, and coconuts, packaging factories have been established overseas to link with high-quality overseas planting bases for standardized grading and packaging. Regardless of the model, Jiawo continuously innovates to introduce higher-quality products, creating consumer demand; at the same time, it ensures product quality with its strict standards to meet consumer needs.1. By rationalizing the planting areas, the supply gap of blueberries is compensated. Fruit cultivation has a strong regional characteristic, and it is difficult to ensure a stable supply throughout the year relying on only one production area. Jiawo has laid out blueberry bases globally: January to May is the off-season production period in the south (Yunnan), June to August shifts to the northern open-field production areas (Shandong, Liaoning, etc.) with the Northern Highbush varieties taking over, and September to December welcomes the import season of blueberries from Peru and Chile, thus achieving a stable year-round supply of blueberries.

2. Customized product manuals are created to make a splash with "large-berry" blueberries. Dairy product grades are usually divided by protein content, while the grading factors for fruits are more diverse. Jiawo has established a detailed product manual for blueberries, strictly defining and standardizing parameters for fruit taste, sweetness, appearance, and defective fruit standards. Taking sweetness as an example, common fruit sweetness levels are strawberries at 10%, watermelon at 12%, and bananas at 14%, while Jiawo blueberries have a sweetness level of over 15%. The "large-berry" blueberries, about the size of a one-yuan coin, overturn the general consumer perception of blueberries and are more attractive in sales. Similarly, a 125g box of large-berry blueberries is priced at twice that of medium-sized fruit. "Nutritious, large-berry, high sweetness" is also the core purchasing mindset of consumers for blueberry products currently.

3. The transportation process is refined repeatedly to reduce losses. A solid supply and distribution capability allows Jiawo blueberries to be delivered to consumers within 48 hours after harvesting. Jiawo also equips different types of cold insulation materials according to the humidity of different production areas and selects transportation routes based on road conditions to minimize damage.

As a category brand, Jiawo has laid out the blueberry industry with a three-pronged approach (full industry chain, globalization, and full traceability). By continuously participating in global blueberry industry conferences and persistently promoting the nutritional benefits of blueberries, Jiawo has increased its influence in both the industry and consumer sectors. Through multi-channel distribution and sales, blueberries have gradually become popular in China.