I was supposed to be at SIAL Shanghai last month. We announced it at the start of the year with great fanfare, I had the flights mapped, the halls shortlisted, and a supermarket safari route half-planned. What I didn't have was a visa. And anyone within earshot of me the past few months has already heard this story, probably twice, so consider yourselves lucky that you won’t be the final stop on the “Visa Woe Is Me” tour.

But China picked a spectacularly inconvenient year to be unmissable. We’ve been working our way across Asia since the start of the year in terms of tradeshows, and China has had an oversized presence at most of them. Thus, ignoring the world’s most competitive food market was not an option. So I did the next best thing: I reached out to GourmetPro experts living and working in China - Louisa Lu, Stéphane Journoux, and David Beutin - and asked them what’s going on.

Louisa told me, “Previously, we used to talk about the impossible triangle: good taste, clean label, function. You could have one, maybe two. Now that triangle is becoming possible, as technology has broken through,” she told me.

Nearly everything on her list traces back to tech breakthroughs. Years of R&D investment compounding on top of China’s manufacturing depth. The same industrial heft that has made China the world’s contract kitchen is now being pointed at harder problems. Here are the trends Louisa is seeing on the ground right now.

Low-GI (glycemic index) foods are seeing a fair bit of traction in China, Louisa said. Not surprising for a country with one of the world’s largest diabetic populations. “But low GI always meant the taste was not good. After several years of innovation, this year I can finally say some of these products actually tasted good. Taste cannot be sacrificed, because Chinese consumers will not accept it.” 

China is still strongly attached to its traditional wellness system: yào shí tóng yuán, or “medicine and food share one source.” Herbs, spices, fruits, vegetables, the whole natural spectrum reigns supreme. As Louisa put it, “Dates are good for the blood. Why do we know? We just grew up knowing.” 

Collaborations used to stay in adjacent categories. Now they’re deliberately strange. Louisa highlighted that they are now seeing beverage-flavored potato chips on shelves and such products are using novelty as a discovery engine.

Restaurant brands are converting their famous dishes into packaged versions that actually preserve the dish’s identity. For example, a restaurant in one city with limited locations can now make their signature dishes available across multiple cities in China. Processing technology has become good enough that the product tastes very similar to the dish at the restaurant. 

Highly regional foods are now able to deliver to a national audience, thanks to improved logistics and e-commerce. Louisa gave the example of an apple cake from a village in the northwest known for its apples. The cake is made from a recipe passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, born of a glut. “The apples were too many, and they could not eat them all, so they combined apples and egg whites to create this cake.” Modern processing turned it into a national, shelf-stable product with a clean label. “When I ate it, I couldn’t believe it. It’s a cake, but it is an apple.” This pattern is repeating across the country. Traditional recipes are captured by technology and are being shipped everywhere, allowing heritage to be made at scale.

This is Louisa’s phrase for the transformation of clean label in China. Clean label meant simple and simple meant dull, but that old trade-off is now becoming a thing of the past. Louisa said, “Now I see sophisticated recipes and complicated taste experiences, but the label is still clean. That is an R&D breakthrough.”

China now has several of the world’s largest dairy companies serving primarily the domestic market. But China’s dairy industry has spent recent years mastering fractionation, the process of physically separating milk into a number of component ingredients, the way refineries split crude. Louisa stresses that this ability is a function of speed, temperature, and density, rather than chemical processes. “Previously China was 30 years behind the US and New Zealand in this kind of processing. But it has accelerated in the past few years.” The timing is pretty interesting. China’s dairy industry has now become the second largest in the world, and the capability to split that milk into high-value fractions arrives just as a massive whey shortage hits the world. The demand for whey is expected to continue to grow as protein needs grow.

“There is a massive localization of taste,” he said. “You can find a croissant or a danish, but with a local flavor. I just saw a tray of Danish pastries flavored with Sichuan pepper at my local bakery. Every region in China has its own specialty and its own taste. And now you see it at Starbucks, at the QSRs, everywhere.” Even Blue Frog, a Western-cuisine chain, redid its menu around local ingredients, local mushroom, and local flavors. Local mushrooms have become extremely popular in the country right now (so much so foragers are disrupting the local ecosystem). 

And once a concept works, it multiplies: “Companies here will take something popular like an egg tart and duplicate it across different flavors, so one product becomes multiple references.”

What decides whether any of them sell? Appearance, before anything else. “I recently bought croissants with pistachio and raspberry because the contrast of green on pink attracted me. It looked good, but the taste was not great. But still, it looked good.” In a market where most discovery happens through a delivery app’s photo grid, the food that photographs best wins the order. 

And China’s delivery infrastructure makes the loop ferociously efficient. A dish ordered from the other side of Shanghai arrives sealed, protected, ice-packed if frozen. “It’s better than Uber Eats or FoodPanda. The delivery services here are very effective, and the food security is well maintained,” Stéphane said.

On health, his observation cuts against what Western ingredient sellers want to hear. Protein is genuinely mainstreaming. There is protein bread, protein everything, especially in convenience stores, but the supplement idea that built Western functional food doesn’t translate. Protein gets a pass because it hides in the food. The more an ingredient looks like something from a Western supplement aisle, the harder it is to sell.

Take one of the hottest functional ingredients right now – collagen peptides. “The factories are in China. Do Chinese consumers use them? No. They believe tea can fix a lot of things, from your skin, your blood pressure, your eyes. When you go to the hospital, you choose between Western medicine and Chinese medicine.” For exporters banking on clinical positioning, that’s a market to rethink, not replicate.

Underneath all of this, there’s a market with room for everyone, including all the copycats. Stéphane said an RMB100 French spring water sits next to an RMB20 local twin. The bottle and label are very similar, but “you have a market for both.” His advice to entrants is the inversion of Western instinct: “If your product is copied, this is a good sign. It means you have the right product. If you’re the only one doing your product, generally it’s a failure.”

In China, imitation isn’t the threat – irrelevance is!

His eye is on the supply chain, and what he sees is a country steadily making at home what it used to fly in. The pattern runs across categories: once an imported product gets a credible domestic version, the import premium evaporates. We saw it with pasta and Airmeter's rise; David points to several more. 

A2 milk is lactose-free and easier to digest, which matters in a market long defined by lactose intolerance. This is a category New Zealand companies built into a global premium. Now China has serious domestic players, and is one of the countries leading the A2 trend. Mintel’s new product launch data found that the category had grown from just 5 products in 2016 to 78 as of September 2025. The growing demand is linked to self-reported dairy discomfort, but consumers also wanting the nutritional benefits of milk. 

Brands like Junlebao Dairy’s Fresh Joy A2 milk calls out its quality credentials, with the “Exceeding EU Standard” and the Singapore Nutri-Grade label on the front of pack. This domestically produced premium product is specifically for export.  

Here the driver isn’t domestic consumers first but the international chains operating in Asia. Major hotel groups like Marriott, Accor, Hyatt, and others, along with F&B chains like Starbucks, are pushing cage-free across all egg products to hit global sustainability targets. This requirement has also reached into Thai banquet and buffet kitchens. Three Thai hospitality leaders recently committed to 100% cage-free sourcing; the supply, increasingly, is met regionally rather than imported. There is growing demand from consumers and manufacturers as well. 

David also pointed out that China now offers the whole chain from bean to bar, not just the final molding. The category has matured enough that Chocolate China launched in 2026 as its own dedicated show alongside Bakery China. And it’s no longer only about the domestic market. Chinese couverture suppliers turned up at THAIFEX, pushing exports into Southeast Asia. They aren’t unseating the Barry Callebauts and Valrhonas of the world yet, but they're starting to compete, and David himself now works with a few of these Chinese chocolate makers on their Southeast Asian expansion. 

This is the part that surprised me. The thing China does that almost no one else can is beautiful, customizable, low-volume product – really fast. David walked me through a factory that controls the entire chain in-house. It can cut a custom silicone mold at a minimum order of around 100, cheaply, then run small tailor-made batches under a client’s own IP. 

The output is pretty extraordinary. You can get spray-painted mousse-cake pandas, molded novelty ice creams, including a peelable banana, a corn cone, a fried-chicken drumstick, white-chocolate shells with real sorbet inside. 

European manufacturers can’t easily match this combination of low MOQ, custom molds, and finish, because their labor cost makes small bespoke runs uneconomic. China pairs lower labor cost with high automation as well as the flexibility to still do hand-finished small batches. David looks at this from the perspective of the supply chain, but it ties in very nicely with Stéphane’s point about how photogenic products are winning the delivery app game and catering to people’s fondness for posting on social media.

The throughline, in David’s reading, is capability. China can build the capacity to own it domestically, and increasingly to supply the wider region from that base. His bet is that this is moving from import replacement into an export push across F&B categories.