China is still hungry for food it cannot easily grow, brew or raise at home. The country has more than 1.4 billion mouths to feed, a middle class that keeps expanding its grocery list, and a domestic food industry that has been rocked by enough safety scandals over the past two decades to leave a permanent mark on consumer trust. Foreign food brands sit right in that gap.
The way into that gap has changed a lot since this article first went up. Back then, the advice was simple: put your product online, ideally on Tmall, and wait. In 2026 the entry map has more roads, more checkpoints and more paperwork than it did ten years ago. This article walks through where the market stands today, which door foreign brands are actually walking through, and what customs expects from you before you get there.
Olivier Verot founded GMA in Shanghai in 2012. Fourteen years of watching food and beverage brands try to break into China have taught him that the products that fail are rarely the ones with a quality problem, they are the ones that picked the wrong entry route.
An imported label is still shorthand for trust in China. That part has not changed since this article first went up. What changed is almost everything about how the product actually reaches the shelf.
How big is the import food market, and where is it heading
China overtook the United States years ago as the world’s largest importer of agricultural products. With roughly 500 million farmers still working the land, the country has never been able to grow enough grain, soybeans and other staples to feed itself, let alone satisfy a middle class asking for more variety. Repeated domestic food safety scandals did the rest. They built a lasting distrust of local brands that foreign competitors have been cashing in on for a decade.
The number: China’s imported food market was worth $139.09 billion in 2022, the first year it crossed the $100 billion mark, up 2.9% year over year, according to Zhiyan Consulting. Full 2026 figures are not public yet, but the direction has not reversed. Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing remain the three entry hubs that handle most of the volume.
The growth is not evenly spread. China’s middle class has absorbed most of the increase, trading up from local staples to imported alternatives across dairy, snacks, wine and packaged goods. What used to be a rare, expensive purchase for a small urban elite is now a routine one for a much wider group of shoppers in tier 1 and tier 2 cities.
CBEC is still the front door, and the rules just moved
Most foreign food brands do not enter China through general trade on day one. They enter through cross-border e-commerce, CBEC, which lets a product reach a Chinese buyer as a personal parcel rather than a commercial import. Lighter paperwork, faster testing of demand, no need for a local entity from the start. For a food brand asking whether it can even sell here, CBEC has been the answer for most of the last decade, and it still is.
What changed is the compliance layer sitting on top of it. On October 14, 2025, China Customs issued Order No. 280, replacing the older Decree 248 that had governed overseas food producer registration since 2021. Order 280 takes effect on June 1, 2026 and tightens who has to register and how. Seventeen categories, among them meat, dairy, aquatic products, bird’s nest and health foods, still require an official government recommendation before an overseas facility can register. Everything else moves to direct, self-filed registration, according to China Briefing.
Here is the detail that matters if you sell through CBEC: retail imports under the cross-border model are still classified as goods for personal use rather than commercial cargo, so they fall outside GACC’s overseas producer registration requirement under Order 280. General trade shipments do not get that exemption. That distinction is exactly why so many food brands stay on the CBEC side of the line for as long as they can, and it is also why crossing the RMB 1 million annual sales threshold that pushes a brand from CBEC into general trade compliance is worth planning for well in advance, not discovering after the fact.
If you want the full mechanics of how a CBEC shipment actually moves, bonded warehouse routing, tax calculation, platform fees, we cover that separately in our CBEC guide.
Where Chinese buyers are actually finding these products
Tmall runs two doors. Tmall.com is for brands with an in-country entity and an established China sales history. Tmall Global is for overseas-licensed brands coming in through cross-border e-commerce. Most food brands starting out use the second door, and it remains the biggest single one for a new brand. In the second quarter of 2025 alone, 580 overseas brands opened a first store on Tmall Global, up 45% year over year, and a third more of those new stores crossed RMB 1 million in sales on opening day than the year before. During Singles’ Day 2025, close to 600 brands passed RMB 100 million in sales and roughly 34,000 brands doubled their volume from the previous year, the platform’s best growth in four years. JD Worldwide runs a similar playbook with a logistics edge, since JD’s own warehouse network handles a lot of the cold chain work that food brands worry about most.
Douyin has pulled a growing share of food and beverage budgets away from Tmall over the past two years, mostly because it sells through content and livestreaming rather than search intent. A shopper does not go looking for Portuguese olive oil on Douyin, a livestream host hands them a reason to want it. We go deeper into when that shift makes sense and when it does not in our Tmall-to-Douyin piece. For food specifically, it tends to work best for products that need a taste, texture or preparation demonstration, and less well for staples people already know they want.
The channel that gets underrated is offline. Sam’s Club and Hema built their entire membership pitch around curated imported goods, and both now run same-day delivery on top of the physical store, which blurs the line between offline and online more than most brands account for. A product that lands a shelf slot at Sam’s Club China gets a credibility signal that no amount of Xiaohongshu content buys on its own.
| Entry route | Legal classification | GACC facility registration | Typical tax load | Time to first sale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CBEC retail (Tmall Global, JD Worldwide) | Personal-use parcel | Not required under Order 280 | Cross-border tax, roughly 70% of standard VAT on positive-list items | 4 to 8 weeks |
| General trade | Commercial cargo | Required, following the 17-category recommendation list where it applies | Full import duty (5% to 25%), 13% VAT, consumption tax where relevant | 3 to 6 months |
| O2O specialty retail (Sam’s Club, Hema) | Commercial cargo via distributor or in-store partner | Handled by the retailer or its importer of record | Built into wholesale pricing to the retailer | 2 to 4 months, retailer-dependent |
What’s pulling growth in 2026
Not every imported category is growing at the same pace. Alcohol has cooled after years of anti-dumping duties reshaping the cognac market. Fresh, high-value niches like oysters and truffles keep growing but stay small by definition, they serve fine dining and gifting, not mass retail. The categories with real volume behind them in 2026 are functional and health-positioned foods, infant and maternal nutrition, and origin-driven specialty products, the kind of items that carry a story a Xiaohongshu post can tell in fifteen seconds. Cheese is a good example of a category that looks tiny in per-capita terms but is quietly compounding, we track the numbers in our cheese market article.
Rafael runs a small Portuguese producer of canned sardines and other conservas, the kind of product that has quietly become a food trend export story out of Portugal over the past few years. He tried Tmall Global first, listed the product with a machine-translated label and no Chinese content strategy, and spent four months watching monthly orders sit under 300 units.
What had not worked was obvious in hindsight: nobody in China had a reason to know what conservas were, or why a tin of Portuguese sardines should cost five times a domestic can. The product needed a story before it needed a storefront.
What worked was slower and less glamorous. His team rebuilt the Tmall Global listing around a proper Chinese name and label, then spent three months building Xiaohongshu content around the ingredient itself, olive oil packed sardines as a snack and an appetizer, before pushing any paid traffic. A small placement in a Shanghai Hema store followed once the online listing had real reviews attached to it.
Five months after the relaunch, monthly CBEC orders were close to 1,800 units, and the Hema placement alone was moving another 600 tins a month. Nothing about the product changed. What changed was that a Chinese buyer finally had a reason to try it before being asked to pay a premium for it.
The customs and sanitary checks you cannot skip
Every food category entering China, whether through CBEC or general trade, sits under GACC oversight, and Order 280 is only the latest layer. Labeling has to be in Chinese, done by a native speaker rather than translation software, and has to carry the specific nutritional and origin information Chinese regulation requires, not just a sticker over the original label. Categories flagged as higher risk, meat, dairy, aquatic products and infant formula among them, go through additional inspection and, for general trade, quarantine at the port of entry. None of this is a reason to avoid the market. It is a reason to build the compliance timeline into your launch plan instead of discovering it after your first shipment gets held at customs.
If you are planning a general trade entry rather than CBEC, the registration and certification steps are covered in more detail in our export guide.
Common questions from food brands entering China
Do we need a Chinese entity to sell imported food in China?
Not to start. CBEC lets you sell without a local legal entity or a Chinese trademark filed in advance, though we still recommend filing your trademark early given China’s first-to-file system. You will need a local entity once you move into general trade, open a physical retail partnership, or want to hold RMB revenue directly.
Is CBEC still viable for a small brand in 2026, or do we eventually have to switch to general trade?
CBEC remains the right starting point for most food brands under the annual RMB 1 million threshold per platform. Above that, regulators expect general trade compliance, which means full import duty, 13% VAT and GACC facility registration where it applies. Plan the switch before you hit the ceiling, not after.
Do we need GACC facility registration under Order 280 if we only sell through CBEC?
No. Cross-border retail imports are classified as personal-use goods rather than commercial cargo, so they sit outside Order 280’s registration requirement. That exemption applies specifically to the CBEC retail model, not to general trade shipments of the same product.
Which imported food categories are easiest to get into the Chinese market right now?
Shelf-stable, lower-risk categories, snacks, coffee, specialty condiments and packaged goods outside the 17 recommendation-list categories, move fastest through registration and CBEC listing. Meat, dairy, aquatic products and infant nutrition carry more paperwork and inspection. Worth the effort, but plan for a longer runway.
GMA has walked food and beverage brands through this exact maze since 2012, from picking the right entry route to building the Chinese content that makes a CBEC listing convert. We handle the Tmall Global and JD Worldwide setup, the Xiaohongshu and Douyin content that gets a new import noticed, and the label and registration checks that keep a shipment from sitting in customs. If you are trying to figure out whether your product should launch on Tmall Global, Douyin or a Hema shelf first, talk to our team through our contact page.
