China buys more food from abroad than any other country on earth, and in 2026 the rules of that game keep shifting under your feet. New customs registration rules took effect in June. Tmall tightened its food safety requirements in May. Douyin’s live commerce hosts are now selling fruit and cheese by the container. If you sell food and you are looking at China, the opportunity is real, but the playbook from five years ago will not get you there anymore. Here is what the market actually looks like right now, and how to approach it.
Philip Chen is CEO of GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency) and has spent over a decade helping food and beverage brands from Europe, the US, and Australia get through China’s import paperwork without losing a shipment at customs. He has sat through GACC registration reviews and Tmall Global category approvals with clients, which is why this guide spends as much time on compliance as it does on marketing.
How Big Is the Market, Really
China was the world’s second largest importer of food in 2024, at roughly $197 billion, according to the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. Early figures for 2025 put the number closer to $207 billion. That covers everything from edible oils and grain to dairy, meat, seafood, fresh fruit, and packaged snacks, and the categories growing fastest in percentage terms are not the bulk commodities. They are premium packaged goods, wine and spirits, and functional foods, the categories where a Chinese consumer is choosing an imported brand on purpose rather than because there is no domestic alternative.
That distinction matters for how you plan your entry. Grain and edible oil move on price and government stockpiling policy. Consumer-facing imported food moves on trust and taste, and those are two things a marketing plan can actually influence. A significant share of China’s urban middle class still actively prefers imported food for specific categories: foreign infant formula for safety, French or Australian wine for status, Japanese and European snacks for taste, health supplements for perceived efficacy. Knowing which motivation applies to your product changes almost every decision that follows, from which platform you launch on to what your product copy says.
Where Chinese Consumers Actually Buy Imported Food
The channels have moved a lot in five years, and where your buyers actually are changes where your budget should go.
Cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) is still the easiest way in for a brand without an existing China setup. Tmall Global, JD Worldwide, and Kaola let you sell from a bonded warehouse or direct from overseas without a full China business registration or product registration in most categories. That has not changed. What has changed is the compliance bar: in May 2026, Tmall International updated its merchant qualification standards specifically for food, tightening documentation around food safety and recall obligations for CBEC retail food, with the new rules taking effect May 27. If your CBEC paperwork was assembled two years ago, it is worth checking it against the current standard before you get a store suspension notice you did not see coming.
Domestic e-commerce on Tmall and JD.com remains the highest-volume channel once a brand has completed full Chinese registration and distribution. Competition for shelf space is brutal, but so is the addressable audience. Some brands are now questioning whether a flagship store alone is enough, and are shifting spend toward interest-based commerce on Douyin instead of, or alongside, Tmall. We wrote a longer piece on that platform migration from Tmall to Douyin if you want the full picture, but the short version for food brands is: Douyin rewards demonstration-heavy products, and food demonstrates well.
The numbers back that up. Between January and May 2026, fresh food on Douyin generated close to 8.9 billion views with a conversion rate of 13.6 percent, and the fruit category alone saw marketing exposure jump 230 percent year over year to over 26.7 billion views. During the June 618 shopping festival, fresh food sales on Douyin grew 73 percent and the number of merchants selling through interest-based commerce zones rose 125 percent. Live streaming still carries close to seven in ten of those sales. If your product photographs or tastes well on camera, this is where a lot of the growth is happening right now.
O2O grocery platforms, Hema (Freshippo) and JD’s 7Fresh in particular, are now essential rather than optional for anything fresh or refrigerated. Chinese consumers in tier-1 and tier-2 cities routinely order imported salmon, cheese, and fruit through 30-minute delivery apps, the same way they order dinner.
Physical retail still earns its place. Premium chains like CitySuper, Ole’, and BHG Fresh, plus food halls in major department stores, carry imported products with premium positioning, and they still function as a discovery and trust-building environment even when most of the actual volume moves online. Industry trade fairs matter too, particularly for finding your first distributor. We cover the main ones, CIIE included, in our guide to food trade fairs in China.
Categories With the Strongest Import Demand
Not every imported food category performs the same way in China. Some have a structural advantage domestic brands cannot easily close. Others are one good local competitor away from losing their premium.
Dairy, and infant formula specifically, is still the most trust-sensitive category on this list. Chinese parents have not forgotten the domestic food safety scandals of the past, and they still lean heavily toward imported formula from Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and the Netherlands. That trust premium is durable and it commands real price tolerance, but it is also earned slowly and lost fast. We have covered the broader shift toward functional infant nutrition in more detail, since the category is not standing still either.
Wine and whisky keep a loyal urban professional audience, French, Italian, and Australian wine and Scotch whisky in particular. Live commerce hosts on Douyin who specialize in alcohol now sell cases directly to viewers in a single session, a distribution channel that simply did not exist ten years ago.
Premium snacks, confectionery, and functional foods do especially well as gifts. Imported chocolate, crackers, supplements, and specialty items from European and Japanese brands move hard during Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival. We have written specifically about what makes high-end chocolate work as a gifting category in China, and most of the same logic applies to premium confectionery generally: the box matters almost as much as what is inside it.
Fresh fruit imports, Chilean cherries, Australian mangoes, Southeast Asian and South African produce, keep growing, and the 230 percent jump in Douyin fruit exposure mentioned earlier is not a fluke. Fresh imported fruit is one of the few categories in Chinese retail where scarcity and quality still beat price on the decision.
What Changed With GACC Decree 280 in 2026
This is the part most food brands skip and then regret. On June 1, 2026, China’s customs authority (GACC) replaced its Decree No. 248 registration framework with Decree No. 280, and the changes are not cosmetic.
- The old fixed list of 18 higher-risk categories requiring official recommendation is now a dynamic catalogue that GACC can adjust as food safety risk profiles change, so a category that was self-declared last year could require formal review this year.
- Registration renewal is now automatic by default for eligible categories, but meat products and edible bird’s nest still require active renewal three to twelve months before expiry, or the registration lapses.
- Cold storage facilities handling land-animal-sourced foods and aquatic products now need their own registration, a new obligation that did not exist under the old rules.
- Every customs declaration since June 1 needs two fields it did not strictly need before: the registration number and a purpose designation marked “for human consumption.” Get either one wrong and the shipment gets held.
Existing valid registrations under the old Decree 248 carry over automatically, so nobody needs to reapply from scratch. But if your renewal date falls after June 2026, or you are registering a new product for the first time, check which of the three new pathways (official recommendation, self-application, or list registration under a bilateral agreement) applies to you before you assume the old process still works.
Chinese-language labeling is still mandatory and still strictly enforced: ingredient list, nutrition facts, allergens, production and expiry dates, importer details, all in Chinese, affixed before the product reaches a Chinese consumer. Brands entering through CBEC face a lighter version of these rules under the bonded warehouse or direct mail models, but “lighter” does not mean optional, and Tmall’s own May 2026 tightening on food safety documentation shows the platforms are policing this more closely than they used to, not less.
A Small Brand That Got the Sequencing Right
Ionut runs a small family business in Transylvania that makes raw sheep’s milk cheese and acacia honey, sold across a handful of European markets. He had a Tmall Global store live for almost a year before he came to us. The product page looked fine. The problem was that almost nobody who did not already know the brand ever found it: monthly online sales sat around 40,000 RMB, most of it from a small circle of Romanian expats and their friends.
His first move, before working with us, was to put money behind Baidu display ads with generic banners and no localized product story. Three months and roughly 25,000 RMB a month later, sales had not moved. The problem was not visibility exactly. It was that a Chinese consumer looking at raw sheep’s cheese for the first time has no reference point for whether it is safe, what it tastes like, or why it costs what it costs, and a banner ad answers none of that.
We shifted the budget almost entirely into content. Fifteen Xiaohongshu posts from food creators built around the shepherd family story and an honest first-taste reaction, plus one Douyin livestream with a host who specializes in imported dairy, cutting and tasting the cheese on camera and answering the safety and sourcing questions live as they came in. The mechanism is simple: for an unfamiliar imported food, a viewer needs to see and hear someone else trust it before they will put it in their own mouth. That is what a banner cannot do and a livestream can.
Over the following four months, monthly online sales grew from 40,000 RMB to roughly 190,000 RMB, with the honey moving faster than the cheese because it needed less explanation. Not a dramatic overnight jump, but a real and repeatable one, and the store now has a base of reviews and repeat buyers it did not have before.
How to Market Imported Food in China
Getting your product into the country is half the job. The other half is showing up consistently on the platforms where Chinese consumers actually decide what to buy.
Xiaohongshu is where discovery happens for food. Recipes, unboxing, honest taste reviews, this is 种草 (literally “planting grass,” meaning content seeding) at work: real users and paid creator partnerships building familiarity long before someone is ready to buy. The audience skews female and urban, 20 to 35, which lines up closely with the demographic actually spending on premium imported food. A brand without an active Xiaohongshu presence in 2026 is invisible to exactly the people most likely to try something new.
Douyin live commerce, as the data above shows, has become the single biggest lever for scale in food. It suits food naturally: you can show preparation, plating, and real taste reactions in real time, which is exactly what a category like imported cheese or fruit needs to overcome unfamiliarity. The trade-off is margin. Established live hosts take a real commission, and live pricing tends to compress toward what looks fair on camera, which limits how premium your positioning can stay.
WeChat still matters for relationship building with customers you already have, and for reaching an older, more affluent audience through brand-owned public accounts. For a premium food brand targeting the 35 to 55 group, a WeChat presence with recipe content, brand story, and a clear path to purchase is still worth maintaining, even if it is not where new customers first find you.
Baidu SEO earns its keep for categories where people research before buying: “safest imported infant formula brand,” “how to tell if French wine is authentic,” “best olive oil for cooking.” That is intent from someone close to a purchase decision. Brands with genuinely informative Chinese-language content can capture that intent at a fraction of what paid search costs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a Chinese company to sell food in China?
Not to start. Cross-border e-commerce lets you sell into China from a bonded warehouse or direct mail without a China entity or full product registration for most categories. You will need proper China distribution eventually if you want to scale into offline retail or domestic Tmall and JD stores, but CBEC is the right way to test demand first.
How long does GACC registration actually take?
It depends on the pathway. Self-application through the CIFER system for a non-listed category can move in a few weeks if your documentation is complete. Categories under official recommendation, the higher-risk list under Decree 280, generally take longer because they route through your home country’s competent authority before GACC reviews them. Budget for months, not weeks, if you are in that group.
Is cross-border e-commerce actually cheaper than general trade import?
Usually yes on the compliance side, since CBEC has lighter registration and labeling requirements. It is not necessarily cheaper on landed cost once you factor in the CBEC tax structure and platform commissions. Run the math on your specific product and price point before assuming CBEC wins by default.
Which platform should a new imported food brand start on?
If your product needs to be seen, smelled, or tasted to be understood, start with Xiaohongshu content and a Douyin livestream partnership before you invest heavily in a Tmall flagship store. Build demand first, then give people a store to buy from.
What does a realistic first-year marketing budget look like?
It varies enormously by category and ambition, but for a brand testing the market through CBEC and content marketing rather than a full offline launch, plan on a meaningful five-figure USD monthly commitment sustained for at least six months. Food buying habits do not change after one campaign. They change after a consumer sees your brand mentioned by people they trust, several times, over several months.
China’s food import rules got stricter in 2026, not looser, and the platforms that move product fastest, Douyin especially, reward brands that can demonstrate their product on camera rather than just describe it. The brands doing well right now are the ones treating compliance and content as one connected job, not two separate ones handled by two people who never talk to each other.
Selling food or beverages in China? GMA has handled GACC and CBEC compliance questions, Tmall Global and JD Worldwide store setup, and Xiaohongshu and Douyin content campaigns for import food brands since 2012. If you are not sure whether your product needs GACC registration or how to structure your first six months of content, get in touch and we will walk through it with you.
