Ask ten Chinese consumers whether they trust the food on their own supermarket shelves and you will get ten different answers. Ask whether they trust a product that carries a customs registration number and a clear, checkable origin, and the answers get a lot more consistent. That gap is where imported food brands have built a business in China for over a decade. It is still open in 2026. It is just harder to walk through without doing the paperwork, and the storytelling, right.
Olivier Verot has run GMA from Shanghai since 2012. He has worked with dozens of F&B brands entering China, from dairy to wine to snacks, and spends a good part of his week on exactly this question: how does an unknown import earn trust faster than the domestic brand sitting next to it on the shelf.
A trust gap with a long memory
Chinese consumer wariness toward some domestic food categories did not appear overnight. The 2008 melamine-contaminated baby formula case is the one most people outside China still remember, and it is well documented: it pushed a generation of parents toward foreign infant formula brands, a preference that still shapes the infant nutrition category today. Through the 2010s, a string of other cases, doping agents in pork, recycled cooking oil, contaminated milk powder, kept the topic alive in the media and in dinner table conversations.
None of that history means a brand should walk into China with fear-based marketing. It is dated, and Chinese regulation has moved a long way since. What it does mean is that trust signals still carry weight here that they would not carry in a market with a shorter memory. A shopper who has seen the news for fifteen years reads a customs code, a certification badge, or a traceability link differently than a shopper who has not. That is the opening.
What actually changed by 2026
The regulatory environment is no longer the loose, reactive system described in older coverage of the topic. On June 1, 2026, China’s General Administration of Customs (GACC) brought Decree No. 280 on overseas food manufacturer registration into force, replacing the previous Decree No. 248 that had governed the system since 2021. Every food product imported into China as cargo now has to carry, on its packaging or in its customs declaration, a registration number for its overseas producer, one issued by GACC directly or approved by the exporting country’s own food safety authority. Consumers can look that number up on the official GACC system to check whether the producer behind the label is actually registered.
According to Xinhua’s coverage of the customs announcement, this is explicitly framed as a tool to help ordinary shoppers “buy with clarity, eat with confidence,” meaning the government itself is now pushing traceability as a consumer-facing feature, not just a back-office compliance requirement. For an import brand, that is useful: it gives you a government-backed reason to put your registration number front and center in your own marketing instead of burying it in fine print.
The “fake import” problem cuts both ways
There is a second reason traceability matters more in 2026: genuine imports are competing against a wave of what Chinese media calls 假洋品牌, “fake foreign brands.” Two patterns keep showing up. One is products made and packaged domestically, then routed through an overseas shell registration so the box can say “imported.” The other is a company simply buying an overseas trademark and marketing an otherwise domestic product as a foreign label. A widely covered case earlier this year involved butter sold as an imported product that turned out to come from a small unregistered workshop, which is part of what pushed regulators to tighten the registration system this June.
For a brand that is genuinely imported, this is frustrating but also an opening. A June 2026 trust consumption survey found that nearly 70% of respondents were willing to pay a premium for what the report calls “certainty trust,” meaning proof, not promises. At the same time, 47.5% said they do not actually mind where a product comes from as long as the quality holds up, but they resent paying an inflated price for a story that turns out to be fake. Read together, those two numbers say the same thing: Chinese consumers are not rejecting imported food, they are rejecting unverifiable claims about it. Prove your origin and you keep the premium. Skip that step and you get lumped in with the shell-registration brands.
Traceability as a marketing asset, not just a compliance line
Cross-border e-commerce platforms got here before the regulators did. Tmall Global and JD Worldwide both built blockchain-based traceability into their bonded-warehouse import flow years ago, letting a shopper tap a product page and see the shipping date, origin country, port of departure, and customs declaration number behind their specific order. It is not a gimmick: surveys on the topic consistently find that a large majority of Chinese online shoppers say they will pay more for a product they can trace back to its source.
What this means in practice for an imported F&B brand entering or already active in China:
- Put the GACC registration number on the product page, not just the box. Show shoppers how to verify it. Most brands hide this in legal text. Treat it as a selling point instead.
- Publish batch-level content, not brand-level content. A short video of the actual farm, factory, or vineyard behind a specific lot works better on Xiaohongshu than a polished corporate film. It reads as proof, not advertising.
- Explain certifications in Chinese, not just display the logo. An organic or HACCP badge means little to a shopper who has never seen the standard explained. One paragraph on what it actually requires does more work than the icon.
- Sell through an official cross-border e-commerce channel when you can. Listing through Tmall Global, JD Worldwide, or a licensed bonded warehouse is itself a trust signal in 2026, since it puts you inside the traceability chain shoppers already associate with genuine imports.
- Address the fake-import fear directly. A short “who we are” page with your factory location, your founder, and your registration history does more to reassure a skeptical buyer than another round of taste-and-texture copy.
A case that mirrors what we see often
One case we handled recently, anonymized here as Elodie, who runs a mid-size French dairy brand, is a fair illustration of how this plays out. Her cheese and yogurt line had been selling through a regional distributor into a handful of Shanghai supermarkets for two years, with flat growth and a repeat-purchase rate under 15%. Her team’s first instinct was to push harder on premium French branding: more chateau imagery, more “since 1920” copy. It did not move the number.
What did move it was rebuilding the Tmall Global product page around traceability instead of heritage. We added the GACC registration number with a one-line explainer on how to check it, a short unbranded video shot at the actual dairy farm showing the milking and packing process, and a Xiaohongshu content series built around “what this cheese looked like before it left France,” including the customs paperwork moment, filmed plainly, without polish. The mechanism is simple: a shopper who already suspects half the “imported” products on her screen are not really imported responds to evidence faster than to adjectives. Over the following four months, the repeat-purchase rate rose to 34%, and reviews mentioning “true import” or “verified” went from almost none to roughly a third of the review volume. Nothing about the product changed. What changed was that skepticism had a specific answer to react to.
Adapting the product and the message
Trust signals open the door, but they do not replace the basics. Market research still needs to happen before launch, because Chinese consumers see imported food as a premium category almost by default, and premium comes with higher expectations on packaging, portion size, and sweetness or salt levels, not just price. What sells in a Paris supermarket is not automatically what sells in a Shanghai one, even for the same product.
The channels have also moved on from what worked a decade ago. A well-referenced Baidu SEO presence and solid WeChat community management still matter, but Xiaohongshu is now where a large share of Chinese consumers research a food brand before buying it, and Douyin has become a real sales channel through interest-based e-commerce, not just an ad platform. A F&B brand serious about building a presence in China’s imported food market in 2026 needs a plan that covers search, short video, and at least one of the interest commerce platforms, backed by KOC reviews that read as genuine rather than scripted.
Compliance has also become a bigger part of the go-to-market plan than it used to be. Brands selling above the small parcel threshold now fall under the rules covered in our 2026 CBEC law guide, and the registration steps outlined above are not optional extras, they are the entry ticket. Brands that treat GACC registration as a formality to rush through, rather than a trust asset to build content around, are leaving a real part of their positioning on the table. For a longer view of category-specific tactics, our earlier guide to the imported food market still holds up on the product-adaptation side, even as the trust mechanics around it have moved on.
FAQ
Do we really need the GACC registration number visible to consumers, or is customs paperwork enough?
Legally, the number needs to be on the packaging or declaration, that part is not optional after June 2026. But treating it purely as paperwork is a missed opportunity. Shoppers who are actively worried about fake imports will look for exactly this kind of proof, so surfacing it on your product page and explaining how to verify it turns a compliance requirement into a conversion argument.
Is Tmall Global or JD Worldwide worth the fees compared to selling through a local distributor?
It depends on your volume and margin, but for a new import brand, the built-in traceability chain on these platforms is doing part of your trust-building work for you before you spend a yuan on marketing. A distributor relationship can still make sense for offline retail, but for building first trust online, the official cross-border channels carry weight a generic online store does not.
How long before traceability content actually moves sales, not just impressions?
In our experience, expect a slower start than a straight discount campaign, often six to ten weeks before repeat-purchase rates move, since trust content works by removing hesitation rather than creating urgency. It compounds, though: reviews referencing verification tend to bring in more reviews referencing verification, which is not something a price promotion does.
Do we need a Chinese factory audit or third-party certification on top of GACC registration?
Not legally, but it helps. GACC registration proves you are a legitimate registered exporter. It does not, on its own, communicate quality the way an internationally recognized certification does. If your product already holds organic, HACCP, or an equivalent badge, translate what it means rather than just displaying the logo, most Chinese shoppers have never seen the standard explained.
Our product is genuinely imported but priced similarly to some fake-foreign brands. How do we avoid being lumped in with them?
Lead with specifics a shell-registration brand cannot easily fake: the actual factory or farm on video, your registration number with a verification link, and a founder or company story that holds up to a search. Vague heritage claims are exactly what fake-import brands copy. Concrete, checkable detail is harder to imitate and is what the more skeptical segment of shoppers is now actively looking for.
Building this kind of trust content for an imported F&B brand is what we do at GMA on a regular basis: registration-backed product pages, farm and factory content for Xiaohongshu, and cross-border e-commerce setup that puts traceability to work instead of hiding it in the fine print. If you are bringing a food or beverage brand into China and want the trust-building side handled properly from the first product listing, get in touch with our team.
