Cheese is growing in China. It is also still a niche. Both things are true at the same time, and any brand that forgets one of them loses money. The Chinese market for cheese reached 426,200 tonnes of demand in 2025, up 16.7% on the year, while domestic production climbed to 231,100 tonnes, up 19.4%, according to research house Zhiyan (Qianzhan industry data). Fast numbers. But the average Chinese person still eats around 0.3 kg of cheese a year. A Japanese consumer eats close to 2.9 kg, a Korean 2.3 kg. So the base is tiny and the runway is long. This article explains where the real volume is, who owns the shelf, and where a foreign brand actually has a place.
This article is written by Olivier Verot, founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency. I have lived in Shanghai since 2012 and worked with dairy and imported food brands trying to build a cheese business in China, from retail sticks to B2B mozzarella for kitchens. What follows is what I have seen work and fail on the ground.
The cheese most Chinese people eat is not the cheese you sell
Start with a hard fact. According to a scientific study from 1984, over 90% of Chinese adults are lactose intolerant. Natural cheeses obtained by fermentation or curdling are the hardest to sell here. This was a painful wall for marketers who tried to bring aged European cheese to China and expected the palate to follow. It did not follow fast.
What actually sold was not traditional cheese. It was processed cheese. Processed cheese is made by melting and blending natural cheeses with oil and additives. Gouda, cheddar and mozzarella get reworked into a lighter, milder, easier product. Chinese consumers eat it on bread or crackers for breakfast, or as a snack. The taste is softened. The smell is gone. That is the point.
Inside that processed category, one product built the whole retail market: the children’s cheese stick (奶酪棒). Little tubes of sweet, calcium-added cheese, sold to mothers as a healthy snack for kids. Le conte, the brand of Milkground (妙可蓝多), turned this single item into a national habit and dragged the entire category up with it. If you understand nothing else about cheese in China, understand this: the market was not built by cheese lovers. It was built by parents buying a snack.
Read: Guide to the China Cheese Market
The cheese stick has hit a ceiling, and that changes everything
Here is the 2026 shift most decks miss. The children’s cheese stick has stopped flying. Two reasons. China’s birth rate keeps falling, so the pool of toddlers shrinks every year. And the product itself ran out of new ideas after everyone copied everyone. Growth in that segment has flattened.
So the big players moved. Milkground and Mengniu now push an “cheese-plus” strategy (奶酪+), spreading into new formats and eating occasions. In August 2025 Mengniu’s Milkground line launched mini cheese triangles, a cloud cheese mousse and a spreadable cream cheese, all aimed at family use beyond the kid snack. The search for a second growth curve is the story of the category right now. And that second curve points straight at kitchens.
The real volume is in kitchens, not on the snack shelf
Look at where the tonnage goes. In 2024, the retail channel moved 111,400 tonnes of cheese. The foodservice channel moved 173,000 tonnes. Foodservice is bigger than retail, and it grows faster. This is the part foreign brands underweight because it is unglamorous. There is no cute packaging. There is a chef who needs mozzarella that stretches and melts at the right price.
The drivers are Western-style eating that Chinese consumers adopted without noticing it was cheese: pizza, baked rice, burgers, bakery, and the milk-cap teas and cheese foam drinks that swept the tea chains. Mozzarella and cream cheese are the workhorses. In 2024 and 2025, chains like Pizza Hut and Dicos plus a wave of independent cafés reported strong mozzarella demand, and local processors expanded output to feed them (Just Food). This is cooking cheese, not tasting cheese. The buyer is a purchasing manager, not a foodie.
China cheese market at a glance (2024-2025)
| Metric | Figure | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Total demand 2025 | 426,200 tonnes | +16.7% year on year |
| Domestic production 2025 | 231,100 tonnes | +19.4% year on year |
| Import dependency | ~46% | Still nearly half imported |
| Retail channel volume 2024 | 111,400 tonnes | Kids sticks, family baking, snacking |
| Foodservice channel volume 2024 | 173,000 tonnes | Pizza, bakery, tea drinks, hot pot |
| Per capita consumption | ~0.3 kg / year | About one eighth of Japan |
| Market leader share 2025 | Milkground 31.7% | Milkground + Yili near 45% |
Where does the cheese in China come from?
China still imports close to half of the cheese it consumes, even after years of local production ramping up. New Zealand is the giant supplier, historically around half of imported value, followed by Australia, Denmark, France, the United States and the Netherlands. Most of that import volume is not fancy. It is bulk mozzarella and cheddar for processing and kitchens.
French cheese sits in a small slice of imports. But it punches above its share on brand. The Bel Group runs a real business here with Mini Babybel and Kiri, even as its Laughing Cow faces a local look-alike called Happy Cow. President and other French names live in the premium retail corner. That is the honest map for a French or European producer: you are not going to win the bulk kitchen tender against New Zealand on price, so you fight where your name and craft mean something.
Who owns the shelf in China’s cheese market
The retail shelf is not open ground. It is controlled. Milkground (妙可蓝多), now inside the Mengniu group, held 31.7% of the packaged cheese market in 2025, and its cheese business revenue reached 4.6 billion RMB, up 22.8%. Add Yili and the top two hold close to 45%. Bright Dairy, Mengniu and Yili round out the domestic side. These companies own the cold chain, the supermarket relationships and the mother’s trust for kids products.
So a foreign brand does not walk in and take a category. It picks a lane. Three lanes work in 2026: premium retail for the adult palate that is slowly forming, B2B ingredient supply to kitchens and bakeries, and know-how, meaning your name as the origin authority on a real cheese. Trying to out-mass the locals is how imported brands burn their budget.
How to sell cheese in China in 2026
The demand is real and the palate is slowly moving. But you have to earn attention in Chinese, on Chinese platforms, with content that teaches. Here is the stack I use with food clients.
Be findable in Chinese: Baidu and the new AI search
Your content has to be in Mandarin. Not translated once and forgotten. Written for how Chinese buyers search. A distributor or a chef checks you on Baidu before they answer your email, and if there is nothing in Chinese, there is no trust. Baidu SEO still carries most of that first-impression traffic.
What is new for 2026 is generative search. Chinese users increasingly ask DeepSeek and Doubao a question instead of scrolling ten blue links. These models answer by pulling from content they were trained on and can reach. If your brand facts, your origin story and your product specs exist in clean Chinese across Baidu, Baike and industry sites, the AI can cite you. If they do not exist, the AI describes your competitor instead. Getting quoted by these engines, call it GEO, is the SEO fight of the next two years. The mechanism is simple: structured, factual Chinese content in the places the models read.
Sell on Tmall, and use Xiaohongshu to create the want
Tmall and Tmall Global remain the trusted storefront for imported food. A company with China operations applies to Tmall.com; a company with only overseas licenses uses Tmall Global for cross-border. The platform keeps standards high, which is exactly why Chinese shoppers trust what they buy there.
But a store does not create demand. Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) does. This is where a young urban woman learns what cheese to buy, how to plate a cheese board, which brand of cream cheese makes the best homemade bake. The mechanism that works: seed real usage notes from mid-tier lifestyle creators and food KOCs, let them show the product in a recipe or a moment, and answer questions in the comments. Search inside Xiaohongshu now behaves like a second search engine for lifestyle products. You want your brand to be the answer when someone types cheese.
Build a private domain on WeChat and work with KOCs
Social media in China is where relationships get built, and cheese is a product that needs teaching. People follow brands and talk to them. WeChat is the base: an official account, a mini-program shop, and community groups where you keep repeat buyers close. That private domain costs you nothing per message and turns one-time buyers into a base you can sell to again. For a niche food, keeping your existing fans is cheaper than chasing new ones.
On influencers, the game moved from big KOLs to KOCs, the smaller key opinion consumers who look like a real friend. For cheese, a KOC showing a genuine recipe converts better than a celebrity holding a wheel of brie. Chinese users trust peers more than ads. Pair KOC content with affiliate links back to Tmall so every post can be tracked to a sale. Weibo still helps for reach and campaign noise, but the trust and the conversion now live on Xiaohongshu and WeChat.
Case study: Cedric and a French cheese that would not move
Cedric runs a family cheese house in France. He came to us after two years selling aged cheese into China through a distributor. The numbers were flat. He was moving under 300 units a month on Tmall Global and his cost per sale on paid banners was eating the margin. The pitch had been the problem. He was selling a strong, affiné cheese to first-time buyers who found it too sharp and too strange, and the ads talked about French tradition to people who had never eaten the product.
We stopped selling the hardest cheese to the coldest audience. First we reframed the range around an entry product, a mild spreadable he already made, positioned for weekend home baking and cheese boards, not for connoisseurs. Then we built the Chinese content that did not exist: Baidu pages, a Xiaohongshu presence with 40-odd KOC recipe posts over a quarter, and a WeChat account answering the one real question buyers had, which was simply how do I eat this. The affiné cheese stayed in the catalogue as the premium step-up, not the front door.
It worked because it matched the palate where it actually is. Within about seven months Cedric’s monthly Tmall Global volume roughly tripled off that low base, repeat purchase rate climbed as the WeChat group grew past a few thousand members, and his blended cost per acquisition dropped by close to 40% because Xiaohongshu search and organic content carried buyers who used to come from paid banners. Not a miracle. A repositioning toward the buyer who was ready.
You can also read our Strategic Guide to Export Food Brands in China
Frequently asked questions about selling cheese in China
Is the cheese market in China big enough to bother with?
It depends what you sell. As a snack and ingredient category it grew past 400,000 tonnes of demand in 2025 and keeps growing double digits. As a market for aged, dégustation cheese it is still small, because per capita consumption sits near 0.3 kg a year. If you sell cooking cheese or a premium retail product with patience, the size is worth it. If you expect France-level cheese-board habits tomorrow, you will be disappointed.
Should I target retail shoppers or foodservice buyers?
Foodservice moves more tonnage, over 170,000 tonnes in 2024 versus about 111,000 in retail, and the buyer cares about melt, stretch and price rather than brand story. If you make mozzarella or a kitchen cheese, chase pizzerias, bakeries and tea chains through B2B distribution. If you make a branded retail cheese, go to premium shoppers on Tmall and Xiaohongshu. Many brands run both, but the marketing for each is completely different.
Can a foreign brand beat local giants like Milkground?
Not head on. Milkground alone held 31.7% of packaged cheese in 2025 and owns the cold chain and the kids category. A foreign brand wins by not fighting there. Take the premium adult niche, the B2B ingredient role, or the authenticity position where your origin is the selling point. You are looking for a defensible corner, not the whole shelf.
How long before cheese marketing in China pays back?
Plan for six to twelve months before the content and the community start carrying sales on their own. Cheese needs education, so the first months go into Chinese search presence, Xiaohongshu seeding and a WeChat base. Brands that expect a return in the first quarter usually quit right before it starts working. The ones that treat it as building a palate, not flipping a switch, get the compounding.
What imported cheese actually sells first?
Mild and useful beats strong and traditional. Cream cheese for home baking, mozzarella for cooking, and gentle spreadable formats open the door. The sharp affiné cheeses come later, as a step-up for buyers who already like the mild ones. Lead with the product a first-timer can enjoy, keep the connoisseur cheese as your premium tier.
For more context on imported food demand, read our analysis of China’s imported food market, our guide on selling high-end food in China, and the key food fairs in China where distributors look for new brands.
Gentlemen Marketing Agency helps dairy and imported food brands build demand in China, from Baidu and GEO visibility to Xiaohongshu seeding, Tmall Global stores and B2B lead generation for foodservice buyers. We know where cheese actually sells and where budgets get wasted. Contact us to talk about your China cheese strategy.
