In recent years, China Online Snack Consumption Trend Report jointly released by CBNData and Taobao University shows that the imports of puffed snacks like biscuits, chocolates, confectionery and jelly are increasing year by year. Among them, the sales growth of puffed snacks is the fastest with a large room for further improvement. Puffed snacks are the benchmark of imported snacks. The import of chocolate, confectionery and jelly is remarkable, but their sales growths are lower than the average, as the market is close to saturation. In addition, the imports of cakes, pastries as well as roasted seeds and nuts are below the average, while their sales growths are above the averag. Therefore, these categories of snack may be a good opportunity for importers. 

    From the perspective of producing areas of online imported snacks, the head producing areas have a solid position with the contribution of more than 80% of total sales amount while only account for about 10% of the total number of producing areas. Snacks from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Japan, South Korea, the United States, Italy, as well as Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and other countries and regions occupy the top 10 amount of imported snacks all year round. 

    There are plenty of options for online imported snacks in a single category. Take the imported puffed snacks sold by Tmall supermarket as example, there are biscuits, potato chips, corn chips, shrimp chips and crispy noodles, and so on, which are mainly from the Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Also, there are many choices from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. Some imported puffed snacks which are not easy to find in the supermarket offline, such as Japanese soymilk waffles, Morinaga cheese brulee, salted egg yolk biscuits and BURTS British hand-cooked potato chips, etc., are all available at Tmall.com.

     As for online imported chocolates, most of them come from European countries. Godiva and Lindt are high-end chocolates in Chinese impression, but more options at the same price or even higher grade are available in online stores (especially the stores on cross-border e-commerce platform), such as Venchi from Italy, Lausenstein from Germany and Patchi from Lebanon, and so on. Compared with the previous two types of snack, the choices of online imported snack cakes are relatively limited. In Tmall supermarket, the most common ones are Japanese dorayaki, Taiwan's pineapple cake and mochi, as well as a variety of sandwich cakes from South Korea and Malaysia. As mentioned above, the importation of pastries still needs to be improved. 

    In addition, different from offline stores, online imported snacks are popular in the form of large gift packages for promotion, giving consumers a feeling of gaining more material benefits, while this kind of sales is rare in offline stores where imported snacks are sold separately.

    Source: www.food2china.com