Every week, foreign infant formula brands write to us with the same question. They have a good product, sometimes a great one, and they want to know why it is not selling in China yet. My answer is almost always the same: in this category, trust is built before the first sale, not after. I am Olivier Verot, founder and CEO of Gentlemen Marketing Agency in Shanghai, and baby milk is one of the categories I spend the most time thinking about, because the stakes for the parents buying it are so personal.
I have been based in Shanghai since 2012 and have guided food, dairy, and baby-care brands through market entry here for most of that time. Infant formula is the category where I push back hardest when a client wants to lead with a discount instead of proof.
Why the Chinese baby milk market plays by its own rules
China’s mother and baby market is large, competitive, and unlike almost any other consumer category. Parents here do not compare formula brands the way they compare snacks or skincare. They compare them the way they compare a hospital or a school. One bad batch scandal from years ago changed buying habits for a generation, and the memory has not faded. It shaped how an entire country of parents shops for milk powder today.
Safety first, price second
Chinese parents will pay a premium without blinking if they believe a product is safe. Price sensitivity in this category is low compared to almost anything else in retail. What matters is proof: where the milk comes from, who owns the factory, what certifications back it up, and whether other mothers vouch for it. A brand that leads with a discount instead of a safety story is starting the conversation on the wrong foot.
Imported origin still carries weight
Being from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, or North America remains a real advantage in 2026. Domestic brands have improved a lot and now hold a large share of the market, but for many parents, especially first-time mothers in tier 1 and tier 2 cities, an imported origin still signals stricter standards. This is not a guarantee of sales. It is a starting credibility bonus that a brand still has to earn the rest of the way with proof and content.
Domestic brands have closed the gap, but not all of it
I want to be honest with foreign clients about this. Chinese domestic formula makers have invested heavily in their own farms, factories, and research, and several now compete directly with imported names on quality and price. Some parents actively prefer a domestic brand today, out of national pride or simply because they have had a good experience with it. A foreign brand entering the market in 2026 should not assume the old playing field still exists. The advantage is smaller than it was ten years ago, and it has to be defended with real content, not just a flag on the packaging.
The data backs this up only partly. The a2 protein segment, mostly foreign owned, grew 14 percent in the first half of 2025 and now covers roughly a fifth of the market’s value, and English-label imported formula kept growing too, as more parents switched to it on purpose rather than by accident. So the imported segment is not shrinking everywhere. It is competing on different ground: fewer buyers now pick a tin just because it is foreign, more because they have checked the science behind it. For the wider trend numbers on premiumization, goat milk formula, and brand market share, we cover those in detail in our China Baby Formula Market: Trends and Strategy for 2026. This article stays focused on how a brand actually earns the trust that turns those trends into sales.
Second and third children change the buying pattern
With more families now having a second or even third child, a growing share of buyers are experienced parents rather than first-time mothers. Experienced parents shop differently. They already have opinions about stage transitions, they compare formulas across siblings, and they are less swayed by pure brand prestige. Content aimed only at nervous first-time mothers will miss this growing group. A full plan speaks to both audiences with different messages.
Where Chinese parents actually make the decision
A parent choosing formula rarely decides in a store. The decision is made over weeks, across several apps, often with input from a pediatrician, a mother’s group, and a stranger’s post online. Your marketing needs to show up in each of these places, not just one.
Mother and baby apps
Apps built specifically for pregnancy and early parenting, tracking due dates, feeding schedules, and baby milestones, are where a lot of early research happens. Parents trust the communities and Q&A sections inside these apps more than a brand’s own website. Getting your product discussed, reviewed, and recommended inside these communities matters as much as any paid placement.
Xiaohongshu is the research engine
If there is one platform I tell every infant formula client to take seriously, it is Xiaohongshu. Mothers search it the way people elsewhere search Google, looking for real reviews, ingredient breakdowns, and honest comparisons between brands. A strong presence here, built through a mix of genuine user reviews and mother KOL content, does more to move a purchase decision than a banner ad ever will. If you want the deeper walkthrough of how the platform works for discovery and search, we cover it in our guide to Xiaohongshu.
DeepSeek and AI search are entering the research phase
A newer habit is showing up with clients in this category: a small but growing share of parents now ask DeepSeek or Doubao’s AI search directly, things like which imported formula brands are considered safest, or what a specific ingredient does, before they ever open Xiaohongshu. These tools answer by summarizing whatever is already published and well structured, your own site, your Xiaohongshu posts, review threads, and news coverage about you. A brand that has been vague or inconsistent about its origin story and certifications online tends to get left out of these answers entirely, or summarized inaccurately. Keeping one consistent, fact-checked version of your claims across every channel, the same discipline described further down in this article, is what gives you a chance of showing up when a parent asks an AI assistant instead of typing into a search bar.
Tmall, JD, and cross-border
Once a parent trusts a brand, they buy on Tmall or JD, often through the cross-border import channels that let them purchase directly from the overseas version of a product. Cross-border commerce is still a meaningful entry point for new foreign brands, because it lets a company start selling and gathering reviews before committing to a full local registration. We go deeper into how this plays out across the wider category in our maternity and baby e-commerce guide. Many successful formula brands in China today started this way and expanded from there.
Livestreaming and short video
Livestreaming remains a strong sales channel for formula, though the tone that works here is different from fashion or beauty livestreams. Parents respond better to a calm, informative host, sometimes a pediatric nurse or a nutrition specialist, walking through ingredients and feeding stages, than to a high energy countdown to a discount. Short video content on Douyin and Xiaohongshu that answers a specific parenting question, such as how to handle a formula switch or what a certain ingredient does, tends to earn steady views long after it is posted, because parents keep searching for the same questions months later.
Registration and regulatory awareness come first
I want to be direct about this part, because I see brands skip it and pay for the mistake later. Infant formula sold in China is one of the most tightly regulated product categories in the country. Formula registration rules cover the recipe, the factory, labeling, and more, and the requirements are strict and detailed.
This is not a marketing decision
I am not a lawyer, and this article is not legal or regulatory advice. What I can tell you, from years of working alongside brands in this space, is that formula registration needs qualified local counsel and regulatory specialists from day one. Do not rely on general advice you find online, and do not assume rules from your home market apply here. Get a specialist involved before you set a launch date.
What this means for your marketing timeline
Marketing and registration have to move together, not one after the other. I have seen brands build a beautiful campaign around a product that was still months away from being cleared to sell locally. The smarter path is to plan your content and community building in parallel with your regulatory process, so that by the time you can sell, you already have an audience waiting. Cross-border channels can also give you a legitimate way to build presence and sales while local registration is in progress.
Labeling and translation deserve real attention
Packaging and labeling in this category go through close review, and a rushed or literal translation can create problems well beyond marketing, from rejected listings to confused parents. The most recent structural shift here is GB 10765-2021, the national food safety standard for infant formula, fully in effect since 2023 and still the baseline in 2026. It removed added sucrose as an allowed ingredient and changed how DHA and ARA must be declared on labels, which pushed several brands to reformulate their stage 1 and 2 products. For the technical detail, our regulatory partners point clients to China Briefing’s breakdown of the standard, but the marketing takeaway is simple: check every claim against the current version before you print it, not the one that existed when the product may have first been developed. On our side, we simply wait for confirmed, approved wording before building any content or ad campaign around it, so that nothing we publish has to be walked back later.
How a foreign brand earns trust in this category
Trust in infant formula is not built with one clever campaign. It is built the same way a parent builds trust in a doctor: repeated, consistent, verifiable information over time.
Tell your origin story simply
Where is your milk sourced. Who owns the farms. What does your factory look like. Chinese parents want plain, visual, verifiable answers to these questions, not marketing language. Short videos of the farm, the factory floor, and the quality testing process consistently perform well, because they replace claims with something a parent can see for themselves.
Work with mother KOLs, not just influencers
The most effective voices in this category are real mothers with real followings built around parenting, not general lifestyle influencers doing a paid post. Their audiences trust them because they have shared their own feeding struggles and choices for months or years. A single review from a respected mother KOL, done honestly, can carry more weight than a large ad budget. We go further into how to find and brief these creators in our article on parenting influencers in China.
Bring in expert content
Pediatricians, registered dietitians, and nutrition specialists who talk about early childhood feeding add a layer of credibility that pure influencer content cannot match on its own. This does not mean making medical claims about your product. It means supporting general parent education, so your brand is associated with expertise rather than just promotion.
Handle claims carefully
Every claim about ingredients, benefits, or health outcomes needs to be accurate, substantiated, and compliant with Chinese advertising law for this category. I always tell clients: when in doubt, say less. Overpromising in this category damages trust fast, and trust is the one thing you cannot buy back quickly once it is lost.
Consistency across every touchpoint
One detail I press hard on with clients is consistency. A parent might see your Xiaohongshu post, your Tmall store page, a mother KOL review, and your customer service reply on WeChat, all within the same week, while researching one purchase. If the story is not the same across all four, the inconsistency itself becomes a reason to doubt the brand. We keep a single source document for approved claims and origin facts, and every piece of content, in every channel, is checked against it before it goes live.
What this looked like for one client
Federica runs a small organic infant formula brand in northern Italy, the kind of company with a genuine origin story, EU organic certification, and a factory she can show on video, but no team in China and no idea where to start. Her first attempt was straightforward: a Tmall Global store and paid ads pointing straight at it. The ads got clicks, the click-through rate was fine, but almost nobody bought. Conversion sat around 0.3 percent for six weeks, and the cost per sale made the whole channel look unprofitable.
We paused the ad spend and spent ten weeks doing the unglamorous part first: short videos of her actual farm and factory, translated and subtitled, plus honest reviews from two mother creators on Xiaohongshu who tested the formula with their own babies and talked about the organic certification in terms Chinese parents actually search for. No paid promotion during this phase, just consistent posting and answering every comment.
When we turned the same ads back on, pointed at the same store, conversion moved to close to 2 percent on the same creative and budget. Nothing about the product or the price had changed. What changed is that a parent clicking the ad could now find someone else’s honest opinion about the brand within thirty seconds, which is exactly the research step Chinese parents told us, earlier in this article, that they go through before buying formula from anyone.
A practical playbook for 2026
Here is roughly how I structure a launch or relaunch plan for a foreign infant formula brand entering China today.
Content before advertising spend
Before running paid ads, we build a base of organic content: Xiaohongshu reviews, short videos explaining origin and process, and Q&A presence in mother and baby app communities. Ads pointed at an audience with no existing trust signals tend to underperform and cost more per result, as Federica’s first six weeks showed.
A sequenced platform plan
- Xiaohongshu for discovery, reviews, and search intent, increasingly including what AI search tools pull from it
- Mother and baby apps for community trust and Q&A
- Tmall or JD flagship store, or cross-border store, for the actual purchase
- WeChat for retention, customer service, and repeat purchase
Community and repeat purchase
Formula is a repeat purchase category by nature. A parent who trusts your brand for the first tin will likely stay with you through several stages of feeding, if you keep showing up with useful, honest content. A private WeChat group or mini program membership program, staffed by someone who actually answers questions, builds this kind of loyalty far better than another round of ads. Our team can help you plan this end to end, from the first Xiaohongshu post to the WeChat retention program. Get in touch and we can map out what that looks like for your brand.
Measure what actually matters
Impressions and clicks are not the numbers that tell you if this is working. Watch review sentiment on Xiaohongshu and Tmall, repeat purchase rate, and whether real mothers are recommending you unprompted in community groups. Those signals tell you if trust is actually building, which is the whole game in this category.
A final thought
Infant formula is one of the few categories where marketing and product integrity cannot be separated. Chinese parents are careful buyers, and rightly so. A foreign brand that respects that, gets its registration right with proper local counsel, and builds trust patiently across the right platforms, has a real opening in 2026. The brands that treat this market like any other consumer category, chasing quick sales with big claims, tend to struggle. The ones that show up consistently, honestly, and with real proof behind every statement, are the ones parents keep coming back to.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need a Chinese company or license to start selling infant formula in China?
Not to start. Cross-border e-commerce channels let you sell into China using your existing overseas entity and product registration, as long as you stay within cross-border import rules and volume limits. Full local retail distribution is different: it requires the complete infant formula registration with Chinese authorities, and in practice most brands work with a local partner or distributor for that stage rather than setting up their own entity from day one.
How long does infant formula registration actually take?
Plan for it to run longer than you expect, often close to a year once you count document preparation, translation, and factory audits, and the timeline moves faster or slower depending on how complete your technical file is on the first submission. Once approved, an NMPA formula registration is valid for five years before it needs renewing. This is exactly why we tell clients to start their content and community building in parallel, not after approval lands.
Can we publish Xiaohongshu content before the product is officially registered?
Generally yes if you are selling through the cross-border channel, but be careful with wording. Build content around your origin story, your factory, and general parenting education rather than specific nutrition or health claims until your legal team has confirmed the exact language your registration and label allow. A post that has to be deleted later hurts more than one that waited two weeks.
Is Xiaohongshu content enough, or do we need paid ads too?
Both, in the right order. Go straight to paid ads and you are paying to send strangers to a brand with no visible track record, which is what happened to Federica in the example above. Build a base of organic reviews and content first, then paid spend converts at a much better rate, because it reinforces trust that already exists instead of trying to create it from a single ad view.
What actually changed in China’s infant formula labeling rules recently?
The GB 10765-2021 food safety standard, fully in effect since 2023, is still the baseline in 2026. It removed added sucrose as an allowed ingredient, changed how DHA and ARA must be declared on labels, and pushed several brands to reformulate their stage 1 and 2 products. If your product was developed against an older standard, check your label and formulation against the current one before you commit to packaging or marketing claims.
Do Chinese parents really use AI tools like DeepSeek to research formula brands?
A growing number do, alongside Xiaohongshu, not instead of it. These tools summarize whatever is already published and well documented about your brand, so the same consistent, fact-checked information you keep across your Xiaohongshu account, your store page, and your customer service answers is what gives you a chance of being included in that summary instead of left out of it.
Gentlemen Marketing Agency has helped mother and baby brands navigate China since Olivier founded the agency in 2012, and we still treat trust-building as the first deliverable in this category, not an afterthought to the media plan. For infant formula specifically, that means coordinating your Xiaohongshu content, mother KOL partnerships, and Tmall or cross-border launch with your registration timeline, so nothing goes live before your claims are confirmed. Want a straight answer on what a China entry would take for your formula brand? Get in touch for a free consultation.
