The Full Guide to Exporting Milk to China

China is the biggest dairy import market in the world, and it is also one of the hardest to enter legally. Most foreign producers who contact us have already found a Chinese buyer. What they have not done is get their plant registered, and that is where the deal dies.

Exporting milk to China is not a marketing problem first. It is a customs problem, then a shelf problem, then a marketing problem. In that order. This guide covers all three, with the rules as they stand in mid 2026.

Written by Olivier Verot, founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency, based in Shanghai since 2012. I have walked European dairy producers through GACC plant registration, Tmall Global listings and Sam’s Club buyer meetings, and I have also seen good products blocked at the border for a label detail. LinkedIn.

China’s dairy import market in 2026: the real numbers

Forget the growth story you read in 2019. The market is big, it is not booming, and the money has moved between categories. Here is what the customs data says this year.

• Between January and May 2026, China imported 1.11 million tonnes of dairy products, down 1.8% year on year. That is the second consecutive year of contraction.
• Over January to April 2026, volume was 957,700 tonnes (up 0.3%) but value reached USD 4.48 billion, up 4.2%. Less volume, more value per tonne. Read that as premiumisation, according to the China dairy trade monthly report published by Foodmate.
• Cheese imports grew 21.2% over the first five months of 2026. Liquid milk imports fell 5.9%. Butter, cream and anhydrous milk fat also grew.
• Domestic raw milk averaged around RMB 3.03 per kilo at the end of 2025, close to 30% below the 2021 peak. Chinese farms are in oversupply, which pushes local players to fight on price.
• Total dairy retail sales in China fell 8.6% in 2025, and 17.2% in January 2026 alone. The premium milk segment is where the drop hurt most, as Huxiu reported in its analysis of the high-end milk price war.

The takeaway for an exporter: plain UHT milk is a shrinking, price-driven category. Cheese, cream, butter and functional dairy are where import demand still grows. If your only product is a one litre carton of whole milk, your margin will be decided by a Chinese distributor, not by you.

Step 1: GACC registration of your production plant

No registration, no import. This is the single point that stops most projects.

Since Decree 248 came into force in January 2022, every foreign facility producing food for China has to be registered with the General Administration of Customs of China (GACC) and carry a registration number printed on the packaging. Dairy has always been in the high-risk group, meaning the registration cannot be filed by the company itself. It has to be recommended by the competent authority of the exporting country, your national food safety agency.

What changed on 1 June 2026 with Decree 280

Decree 248 was replaced. GACC published Decree 280 on 14 October 2025, and it entered into force on 1 June 2026. It is now the text that applies to you. Three changes matter in practice:

• Risk-based classification. Customs now sorts foreign plants into categories and applies different levels of scrutiny to each. Dairy stays in the demanding tier.
• Automatic renewal. A registration that reaches its expiry date is now extended automatically for five more years. Under the old regime, missing your renewal window meant starting again. Several producers lost a year that way.
• A revised list of 17 categories that require official recommendation. Dairy (乳品) is on it, alongside meat, aquatic products, infant and special dietary foods, and health foods. Some categories that were listed under Decree 248, such as edible oils and dehydrated vegetables, came off.

Plants already registered keep their status, their number stays valid, and trade is not interrupted. GACC counts more than 93,000 registered food facilities across 178 countries and territories. The official implementation notice sits on the Chinese government portal, GACC announcement no. 27 of 2026. Send that link to your quality manager, not a summary written by a consultant.

The cross-border e-commerce exemption

Here is the door that stays open. Goods sold through cross-border retail e-commerce are cleared as personal-use items, not as commercial imports, so GACC plant registration is not required for that channel. It is the reason so many foreign dairy brands start on Tmall Global or JD Worldwide instead of a container to Shanghai port.

Do not read this as a permanent loophole. It is a policy choice that can be narrowed, and the CBEC rules have already tightened elsewhere. We covered the latest thresholds in our guide to the CBEC law and the RMB 1 million threshold. Treat CBEC as a market test that funds the general trade registration, not as your end state.

Step 2: the bilateral health protocol, country by country

Plant registration is not enough on its own. China negotiates a sanitary protocol with each exporting country, product family by product family. If your country has no signed protocol for the specific product you want to ship, no amount of paperwork on your side will help. The negotiation happens between governments and it takes years.

What this means concretely:

• Check your national authority’s China export page first, before you talk to a buyer. In France it is the DGAL, in Canada the CFIA, in New Zealand MPI, in Ireland DAFM.
• Each shipment needs a health certificate issued by that authority, matching the protocol model. A certificate in the wrong format is refused at the port even if the milk is perfect.
• Protocols cover a defined scope. A protocol on milk powder does not automatically cover UHT milk, cheese or cream.

New Zealand remains the largest supplier of dairy to China, helped by its free trade agreement. Germany has become the main source of imported liquid milk. The United States supplies most of the whey powder, and Australia keeps a solid share in both powder and fresh milk.

Step 3: the Chinese label

Every pack sold through general trade needs a Chinese label applied before customs clearance, usually printed or applied in the bonded warehouse. It is not a translation exercise. The national standards define what must appear and how.

• Product name using the legal category name, not your marketing name. “Pure milk” and “modulated milk” are different legal categories in China.
• Full ingredient list, nutrition panel in the Chinese format, net content, country of origin, production and expiry dates.
• Name and address of the Chinese importer or distributor, with their contact details.
• The GACC registration number of the producing plant.

Claims are the trap. Wording that is normal on a European pack can be treated as a non-permitted claim in China. Have the label checked by a Chinese regulatory consultant before you print 200,000 units. It costs a few hundred euros. A blocked container costs a season.

UHT milk and infant formula are two different businesses

People ask me about “exporting milk” and mean two completely different projects.

UHT and liquid milk need GACC plant registration, a bilateral protocol, a compliant label and a distributor. Heavy, but doable in months.

Infant formula adds a second regime on top: each recipe must be registered with SAMR, product formula by product formula, and the file is far heavier than a plant registration. The numbers show how narrow that gate is. As of 31 March 2026, 1,273 formulas were registered under the new national standard, of which only 253 were imported ones (19.9%). Ninety-six companies and 157 plants passed, and only 36 of those plants are outside China. SAMR also started accepting registration files for infant liquid milk formulas in December 2025.

If baby formula is your project, that is a separate roadmap. Read our dedicated guide on how to promote a baby milk brand in China and budget two to three years before your first legal sale through general trade.

Why Chinese consumers still pay more for imported milk

The 2008 melamine scandal is still the reason. Around 300,000 children were affected, six died, and roughly 54,000 were hospitalised. Sanlu was identified as the main culprit, then other Chinese dairy companies were pulled in. Over a hundred foreign brands entered the market in the years that followed.

Later incidents kept the memory alive. In 2020, a protein-based powder marketed to children in Chenzhou triggered a national outcry, with the hashtag #郴州大头娃娃事件 passing 70 million views on Weibo. Parents born in the 1990s did not live through 2008 as adults, but they grew up hearing about it.

What this buys you today is a hearing, not a sale. Chinese buyers now expect traceability, clear labelling and recognisable foreign certifications. An unknown European brand with no Chinese-language presence gets the same shrug as an unknown Chinese one. Trust in “imported” is category-level. Trust in your brand has to be built.

Your real competitors are Yili and Mengniu

Two Chinese groups dominate the domestic shelf, and they are not the weak players of 2010.

Yili posted RMB 115.9 billion in revenue for 2025, with net profit up 36.8%. Mengniu came in at RMB 82.2 billion, down 7.3%, its liquid milk business falling 11.1%. The gap between the two widened to RMB 33.4 billion. Both have their own premium ranges, their own organic lines, their own A2 products, and cold chain reaching down to county-level towns.

With raw milk cheap and domestic supply long, they can hold prices down for a long time. So do not enter on price. Enter on something they cannot copy quickly: a specific origin with a story, a protected designation, grass-fed or mountain pasture provenance, a process, or a category where imports still grow such as cheese and cream.

China also remains structurally short of milk in some categories, which is why imports never disappear. Two Normandy dairy groups built their China business on exactly that. Isigny Sainte-Mère built a dedicated unit producing up to 30,000 tonnes of powder a year for its Chinese partner Biostime, hiring around a hundred people and lifting production 20% at its supplying farms. Maîtres Laitiers du Cotentin opened a plant in 2017 to supply Synutra, aiming at 690 million milk packs a year.

Which channel: importer, CBEC, or premium retail

The traditional importer and distributor

The classic route. Your Chinese importer handles clearance, labelling, warehousing and placement. You get volume and you lose control of pricing, positioning and consumer data. Most distributors will also ask you to fund the in-store promotions. Sign an annual minimum and a clear exit clause, and keep the trademark registered in your own name in China, filed before you send a single sample.

Cross-border e-commerce

Tmall Global, JD Worldwide, Kaola and Douyin’s cross-border section let you sell without a Chinese entity, without plant registration and without a Chinese label on the pack. Long shelf-life products travel well through bonded warehouses. Fresh milk does not, so this route suits powder, cheese and long-life products. Opening a flagship store is not a weekend job, which is why brands usually work with a TP agency or a partner. Our team covers this side at GMA’s China e-commerce practice.

Sam’s Club and Hema for the premium play

This is where imported dairy is actually winning right now. Sam’s Club China passed RMB 140 billion in sales in 2025, up around 40%, opened ten stores that year and plans thirteen more in 2026 across ten cities, reaching 76 clubs. Hema is expanding on the same logic: curated assortment, private label, quality-first customers who read the origin label.

These buyers do not want your full catalogue. They want one or two references, exclusive to them, in their pack format, at a price they set. It is demanding and the volumes are concentrated on few SKUs. But a listing at Sam’s Club does more for your credibility with every other Chinese buyer than a year of trade fairs.

Case study: a French dairy cooperative that stopped selling milk

Aurelie runs export at a mid-sized French dairy cooperative. She came to us with a registered plant, a signed protocol, and a Chinese importer who had taken three containers of UHT milk in eighteen months, then gone quiet. Landed cost put her one litre carton at RMB 19 on the shelf. Yili’s premium organic line sat at RMB 15. Sell-through was under 30% and two batches came back close to expiry.

She had already tried the usual fixes. A distributor change, a price cut of 12%, a booth at a food fair in Shanghai that produced 40 business cards and no order. None of it worked, because the problem was not distribution. Her product was in a category where a Chinese giant with cheap local raw milk can always undercut her, and where the consumer sees no reason to pay more.

What worked was changing the product mix. We moved her to butter and cream, two categories where import demand is still rising and where French origin carries real weight with buyers. We built a Chinese-language brand base first: a Baidu-indexed Chinese site, around forty Xiaohongshu notes from home-baking KOCs showing the cream whipping and holding, and a WeChat account feeding her importer’s sales team with content they could forward to buyers.

The reason it worked is boring: baking bloggers create a reason to pay more, and butter does not compete with the RMB 15 carton. Fourteen months later she had a regional Hema listing, cream and butter at 61% of her China revenue, and her China turnover had roughly doubled from a small base. Not spectacular. Sustainable.

Build demand before the container leaves

Chinese buyers check you online before they answer your email. Distributors do the same. If nothing about your brand exists in Chinese, you are a stranger with a price list.

Be findable in Chinese

Baidu still holds the professional search. A Chinese-language site, hosted in mainland China with an ICP licence, ranks far better than a translated page on your European domain. We go into detail in our guide to Baidu SEO, so two lines here. Add the newer layer: generative engines. Chinese buyers now ask DeepSeek and Doubao “which European butter suppliers export to China”. Those models answer from indexed Chinese-language pages, Zhihu answers and press articles. If your specifications, certifications and origin story only exist in English PDFs, you are invisible to them. Publish the same facts as Chinese text, in plain sentences, on pages a crawler can read.

Xiaohongshu is where dairy gets decided

Xiaohongshu works as a search engine for food purchases. A mother comparing two imported milk brands types the name and reads what real users wrote. The mechanism to use is KOC seeding: fifty to a hundred small accounts posting genuine usage over three months creates a body of results that any later search will find. One big KOL post gets a spike and then nothing. Volume of small honest posts beats one paid celebrity, because the buyer scrolls for proof, not for glamour.

Zhihu, PR and the trust layer

Zhihu is where the technical questions live. “Is imported UHT milk different from fresh milk”, “which country’s dairy standards are strictest”. Well-sourced answers on those threads keep working for years and get quoted by AI assistants. Combine it with Chinese press coverage. PR remains the cheapest credibility per euro in China, and it is what a distributor’s legal team looks for when they check you out.

Private domain WeChat for the B2B side

Underused by food exporters. A WeChat account plus a group where your importer’s regional sales reps get product sheets, lab results and short videos they can forward to their own clients. It costs almost nothing and it makes your product the easy one to sell in their bag. Sales reps push what is simplest to explain.

One last note on adjacent categories. Plant-based drinks and lactose-free products follow different rules and a different consumer. If that is your angle, see our articles on plant-based milks in China and lactose-free products.

FAQ: exporting milk to China

How long does GACC registration take for a dairy plant?

Plan six to eighteen months, and most of that time is spent in your own country. Your national authority collects the file, audits the facility and then submits the recommendation to Chinese customs. GACC review adds a few months on top. The delay is rarely on the Chinese side. It is the queue at your national agency, which handles all exporters at once. Start the file before you have a buyer, not after.

Can I sell milk in China without registering my plant?

Yes, through cross-border retail e-commerce only. Those goods clear customs as personal-use items, so plant registration is not required and you do not need a Chinese label on the pack. The limits are real: bonded logistics suit long shelf-life products, volumes per order are capped, and you cannot supply supermarkets or the food service channel this way. It is a market test, not a distribution strategy.

Is plain UHT milk still worth exporting to China in 2026?

Only if you have a cost or origin advantage you can defend. Liquid milk imports fell 5.9% in the first five months of 2026, domestic raw milk is cheap, and Yili and Mengniu are fighting on price with local supply. Meanwhile cheese imports rose 21.2%, and cream and butter grew. If you have a full dairy range, lead with the categories that are growing and use the milk as a volume complement.

What is the difference between exporting milk and exporting infant formula?

Infant formula carries a second registration on top of the plant one: every recipe must be approved by SAMR individually, with a full technical dossier. As of 31 March 2026 only 253 imported formulas were registered under the new national standard, against 1,020 domestic ones, and just 36 overseas plants had passed. Budget years and a significant legal spend. Regular milk, cheese and cream are far lighter files.

Do I need a Chinese trademark before I export?

Yes, and file it before you talk to anyone. China works on first-to-file. Register the Latin name, a Chinese name you have chosen yourself, and the relevant classes. We have seen distributors and third parties register a European brand’s Chinese name and then sell it back. Choosing your own Chinese name also matters commercially, because if you do not pick one, consumers will invent one and you will not control it.

GMA helps dairy exporters get found and get listed in China

We are a Shanghai-based agency working with foreign food and dairy producers who need Chinese buyers to find them and trust them. We build the Chinese-language visibility layer: Baidu and AI search presence, Xiaohongshu KOC seeding, Zhihu and PR credibility, WeChat content for your distributor’s sales team.

We also run cross-border e-commerce stores and connect brands with importers and premium retail buyers. We do not handle GACC registration itself, that goes through your national authority, but we tell you where you stand before you spend.

Contact us and tell us which dairy category you want to bring to China. We will answer with what we would do first.

Read more about selling dairy in China

• How to sell dairy products in China
• How to promote your baby milk brand in China
• The imported milk market in China