The Ice Cream Market in China

Russian ice cream got its moment in China when Vladimir Putin handed Xi Jinping a box of it at the G20 summit in Hangzhou. Xi replied that he tasted Russian ice cream on every trip to Russia. Cankaoxiaoxi reported it, Chinese social media picked it up, and importers in Inner Mongolia suddenly had a story to sell. That story still gets repeated in trade press. It is a good entry point, but it is not a market analysis. So here is the wider picture: what the ice cream market in China actually looks like now, who controls it, why the premium bubble burst, and where an imported brand can realistically fit.

I am Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have been in Shanghai since 2012 and my team has run China launches for imported dairy, frozen desserts and cold chain food brands, including a Russian ice cream importer. Frozen is the category where marketing budget and logistics reality collide fastest, and I have watched several brands learn that the hard way.

Russia-China partnership at best level in history: Putin

China eats more ice cream than any other country by volume, but almost none of it is imported.

How big is the ice cream market in China

China is the largest ice cream market in the world by volume. According to 智研咨询 (Zhiyan Consulting), the market reached 195 billion RMB in 2025, up 7.4% year on year, after 183.5 billion RMB in 2024. Ten years earlier, in 2015, it was 83.9 billion RMB. That is more than a doubling in a decade, driven by cold chain buildout, higher disposable income in tier 3 and tier 4 cities, and ice cream shifting from a summer treat to a year-round snack.

The number that matters more for a foreign brand is the second one: growth has slowed to single digits and the price ladder has moved down, not up. This is a large, mature, very crowded market. It is not an emerging one.

The premium boom, then the backlash: 雪糕刺客

Between 2018 and 2022 the Chinese ice cream market went upmarket fast. Local brands launched artisanal sticks at 15, 30, even 66 RMB. Zhong Xue Gao (钟薛高) was the emblem of that wave. Founded in 2018, it crossed 100 million RMB in revenue in sixteen months and passed 1 billion RMB in sales in 2021. Its 66 RMB “Ecuador Pink Diamond” stick became famous.

Then came 雪糕刺客, literally “ice cream assassin”. The term went viral on Chinese social media in the summer of 2022. It described the experience of picking an unlabelled stick out of a convenience store freezer and getting stabbed at the till by a price nobody had shown you. It was a pricing transparency complaint that turned into a cultural rejection of overpriced dessert. Regulators followed with clearer price display rules. Consumers followed with their wallets.

The correction was brutal. Zhong Xue Gao ended up discounting the same product lines down to 2.5 RMB, and in June 2025 one of its subsidiaries entered bankruptcy liquidation proceedings, as reported by 观察者网 (Guancha). Häagen-Dazs China went from more than 400 stores to 247, closing over 150 in roughly eighteen months. Meanwhile Mixue (蜜雪冰城) sells a 2 RMB cone by the billion units per year.

Read the survey numbers again: in 2025 only 6.94% of Chinese consumers would buy a single ice cream priced above 20 RMB, and 77.39% shop under 10 RMB. If your import landed cost forces you above 20 RMB retail, you are selling to seven people out of a hundred, and those seven have Häagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry’s and a hundred gelato shops in front of them already.

The lesson is not “premium is dead in China”. Premium gelato at 30 to 50 RMB per scoop still performs in food service. The lesson is that premium packaged ice cream in a retail freezer, with no story and no service around it, no longer has permission to be expensive.

Who owns the freezer

Two domestic groups dominate. Yili holds 18.5% of the market and ranks first, with brands like Qiaolezi and Zhenxi and a distribution network in the millions of points of sale. Mengniu is right behind with more than 800,000 terminals. Together they take close to a third of the whole market. Add Unilever’s Wall’s (和路雪) and Nestlé, both in China for decades, and the four of them hold over half of offline share.

Behind them sits a second tier of strong regional players: Bright (光明), Babi (八喜), Tianbing, Deshi. Then a third tier of gelato chains and cheap-stick specialists. Yili also spends aggressively on brand: its World Cup campaign run without FIFA rights is a good example of how local groups fight for attention.

What this means practically: the freezer is full. A convenience store freezer in Shanghai holds maybe 60 to 90 SKUs, and Yili, Mengniu, Wall’s and Nestlé have paid, in cash or in freezer equipment, to be in most of those slots. A new imported brand is not competing for consumer attention first. It is competing for physical space that somebody else already owns.

Seasonality and cold chain, the barrier nobody budgets for

Over 70% of annual ice cream sales in China happen between May and September, and July alone is around 20% of the year. The season has stretched from roughly three months to six, April to September, but the shape is still a spike. That means your working capital is locked up in inventory before the season, and your dead stock risk lands in October.

Cold chain in China has improved a lot. In 2025 the sector generated 556.7 billion RMB in revenue, the refrigerated truck fleet reached 563,500 vehicles (+19% year on year), and cold storage capacity hit 263 million cubic metres. That is real infrastructure. It is also still uneven: coastal tier 1 and tier 2 cities are well covered, inland and rural distribution much less so, and every handoff between truck, warehouse and store freezer is a chance for the chain to break.

Logistics is 9.7% of total cost structure in this category, against 6.9% for direct labour. For an imported product arriving frozen from Europe or Russia, that number is far higher. This is the single most common reason a foreign ice cream project dies in China: the marketing plan was fine, the landed cost per stick was not.

Convenience stores and instant retail

Street shops and convenience stores together move about half of all ice cream volume in China. E-commerce is 18%, supermarkets 17%, food service 10%, vending machines and other channels the remaining 6%. Ice cream is an impulse buy, and impulse buys happen within 200 metres of where the craving starts.

The change since 2023 is instant retail (即时零售). Meituan Instashopping, Ele.me and Taobao Shangou now deliver from local stores and dark stores in under 30 minutes, including frozen. The instant retail market passed 2.5 trillion RMB in 2025, growing around 35%, and ice cream is one of the categories that fits it perfectly: hot afternoon, no desire to leave the apartment, three sticks delivered in 25 minutes. Convenience stores connected to these platforms report meaningfully higher order volumes.

For a foreign brand, instant retail is the cheapest realistic entry into physical distribution. You do not need national listing with a big chain. You can start with a few hundred stores and dark stores in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Chengdu, and the platform gives you sales data by store, by hour, by weather. Use it to prove rotation before you go negotiate with a national chain.

The imported niche, and the Russian case

Now the honest part. Imported ice cream is a rounding error in this market. Domestic groups hold the volume, and the two biggest foreign players, Nestlé and Unilever, have been manufacturing inside China for decades. They are not imports. Everything genuinely shipped in frozen from abroad, Russian included, sits in a niche measured in thousands of tonnes against a market of millions.

That niche is real, though, and Russian product has the strongest position inside it.

Russian ice cream in the Chinese market

A major importer of Russian ice cream into China is Manzhouli Ange Import & Export, in Inner Mongolia. It started importing Russian ice cream years before the Putin gift, and after it, sales jumped and the company expanded its range from 50 references to 400. Orders arrived from all over China, including provinces as far away as Zhejiang. Manzhouli customs recorded more than 270 tonnes of Russian ice cream worth 863,000 USD in the first eight months of 2017, a 267% increase on the previous year.

Another Russian company, IceBerry, pushed into China as well. IceBerry is one of Russia’s older brands and produced desserts for the Kremlin for decades. After Putin’s 2016 visit, it marketed its product as a “national gift” and sold it through Qing-Feng Steamed Buns, a well known Beijing food chain. Denis Kazmin, deputy director of IceBerry, told Rambler News Service the company was looking at buying a factory in Siberia to cut export costs, and did not rule out producing inside China.

Russian export data supports the trend: national ice cream export volume grew from about 3,000 tonnes in 2010 to 26,000 tonnes in 2020, and in the first quarter of 2021 exports to China rose 66% year on year. Impressive percentages on a small base. Twenty-six thousand tonnes is Russia’s total exports to the whole world. China’s domestic market moves that in a matter of days.

Why Chinese consumers like it: natural milk perception

The Soviet manufacturing standard introduced in 1941 was among the strictest in the world, and Russian producers still trade on it. Chinese buyers repeat the same points: milk content above 80%, thicker chocolate, no vegetable fat substitutes. Trading companies say it plainly, and it lands, because food safety and ingredient honesty rank high with Chinese parents in particular.

Price helps too. According to Beijing Daily, IceBerry retailed at roughly 6 to 30 RMB, well below most Western imports, and individual stores were selling around 300 units a day. That price band is exactly where the market sits today, under 10 RMB for the bulk of it. Russian product is one of the few imports that can hit it.

Something interesting happens in July 2026: the new national standard GB/T 31114-2024 replaces the 2014 version and removes the vegetable-fat category from the definition of ice cream. Under the new rule, a product labelled 冰淇淋 must be based on milk or dairy. Brands that already run high real-milk content, which describes most Russian producers, gain a regulatory argument they previously had to make with marketing alone. Say it in your packaging and your content, in Chinese, with the standard number.

Where the real bottleneck is

Transportation and storage remain the main problem, exactly as they were ten years ago. Chinese partners have been building freezing capacity along the border to fix it: a complex opened in Suifenhe can store 50,000 tonnes of ice cream. Border logistics via Manzhouli and Suifenhe is the reason Russian ice cream works at all at these price points. Any brand that ships from further away loses that structural advantage immediately.

And then there is the part importers keep underestimating. Foreign brands that sell hundreds of times more in China do it because they spend on marketing. Without brand building, an imported ice cream stays a curiosity in a border-city freezer. That was true in 2018 and it is more true now that the freezer is fuller and the consumer is more price-aware.

How to build an ice cream brand in China

Chinese consumers buy brands, not products

To run an ice cream business in China you need a brand in Chinese, with a Chinese name you own and have trademarked. This part of the game has not changed. What changed is where the brand gets built.

Search is where the purchase decision starts

Baidu still matters for B2B, distributor research and credibility checks. But for a consumer food product, product discovery now runs through Xiaohongshu search. Users type 俄罗斯冰淇淋 or 高奶含量雪糕 into Xiaohongshu, not Baidu, and read 30 to 50 user notes before buying. The mechanism to influence is volume and consistency: you need a steady flow of genuine notes from real accounts using consistent keywords in the title and first line, because Xiaohongshu’s search ranks on engagement and keyword match, not on ad spend. Twenty good notes beat one campaign.

The second search shift is generative engines. Chinese consumers and buyers now ask DeepSeek, Doubao and Kimi direct questions: “which imported ice cream brands have the highest milk content”. These models answer from indexed Chinese-language content. If your brand only exists in English on a .com, you are invisible to them. GEO work means publishing structured, factual Chinese content that answers those exact questions, on domains the models actually index: your Chinese site, Baijiahao, Zhihu, Sohu, industry media.

Douyin, WeChat and KOC

Douyin is interest e-commerce: the platform pushes your video to users who never searched for you, and if they buy inside the video, the algorithm pushes it harder. For frozen food this only works if fulfilment is regional, so pair Douyin with instant retail stock in the cities you target, not with a single warehouse.

WeChat is your private domain. Official account, mini-program store, and above all WeCom groups tied to specific stores or cities. For a seasonal category, a private domain list is what lets you restart sales in April without paying for the audience again. One client of ours reactivates 40% of their previous-summer buyers this way.

KOC beats KOL in this category. A hundred micro accounts with 5,000 to 50,000 followers, paid partly on affiliate commission, produce more conversion per RMB than one celebrity, and they generate the search content described above at the same time. AI-assisted customer service on WeChat handles the repetitive questions (storage, delivery time, milk content, allergens) so your team only touches complaints and distributor leads.

Reputation before campaign

A new brand in China needs reputation before it needs reach. Chinese consumers do not trust unknown labels, counterfeits are common, and people check. Baidu Baike entry, Zhihu answers, a few articles in Chinese food media, verified accounts across platforms. Do that before you spend on ads, or your ads will send traffic to a brand that looks fake. The same sequence applies to any imported food category, from high-end chocolate to soft drinks.

Case study: Anton, a Russian ice cream producer

Anton runs a mid-sized dairy and ice cream plant in Russia. He came to us with a distributor in Manzhouli, 40 SKUs already cleared for import, and 18 months of flat sales sitting around 90,000 RMB a month. The distributor blamed the market. Anton suspected it was something else.

What he had tried: a Tmall Global cross-border store, and two live-streaming sessions with a mid-tier Douyin host. The Tmall Global store did about 12 orders a week, because nobody buys a 9 RMB frozen stick cross-border with a five-day delivery and a shipping fee larger than the product. The live-streams sold 3,200 units in one evening, then nothing, and the returns were painful because half the boxes arrived soft. He had spent roughly 260,000 RMB for no repeatable channel.

The diagnosis was simple: he was selling a convenience product through channels built for shelf-stable goods. We killed the cross-border store and rebuilt around local stock. Three things worked.

First, instant retail. We placed him in 340 convenience stores and dark stores across Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou, connected to Meituan Instashopping, with local frozen stock held by his distributor’s Shanghai partner. Delivery in 30 minutes, product still hard. Second, Xiaohongshu search. We ran 120 KOC notes over four months anchored on 俄罗斯冰淇淋 and 80%牛奶含量, paid partly on affiliate, so that anyone searching the category found him repeatedly rather than once. Third, a WeCom private domain built from QR codes on the packaging, which turned repeat buyers into a list he owns.

It worked because the three pieces reinforce each other. The Xiaohongshu notes created demand, instant retail let that demand convert within 30 minutes while it was still a craving, and the private domain meant he did not pay twice for the same customer. Over ten months, monthly revenue went from 90,000 to 610,000 RMB, and the private domain list reached 21,000 contacts. Not spectacular multiples. A repeatable channel, which is what he did not have before.

Frequently asked questions

Is there still room for an imported ice cream brand in China?

Yes, but in a niche. Domestic groups and locally manufactured international brands hold well over half the market and all the prime freezer space. What remains open is the imported-origin segment, where a foreign brand competes on ingredient credibility rather than price or scale. Russian, Japanese and some European products live there. Plan for a business measured in tens of millions of RMB, not hundreds, and build your cost structure so it works at a sub-15 RMB retail price.

Why did premium ice cream collapse in China?

The 雪糕刺客 backlash of 2022 turned high prices into a reputational problem, not just a purchase barrier. Consumers felt tricked by unlabelled sticks in convenience store freezers. Regulators tightened price display rules. By 2025, only 6.94% of consumers would pay above 20 RMB for a single ice cream and 77.39% shopped under 10 RMB. Zhong Xue Gao, the brand that defined the premium wave, went into bankruptcy proceedings in June 2025.

Which channel should a new imported brand start with?

Instant retail through convenience stores and dark stores in three or four cities. It requires no national listing, gives you store-level sales data within weeks, and matches the impulse nature of the category. Pair it with Xiaohongshu search content so people discover you and can buy within 30 minutes. Cross-border e-commerce does not work for frozen impulse products, whatever the platform sales team tells you.

Does the new GB/T 31114-2024 standard change anything for foreign brands?

It helps producers with genuine dairy formulations. From 1 July 2026, products using vegetable fat can no longer be labelled 冰淇淋, since the standard defines ice cream as milk or dairy based. Brands with high real milk content, which includes most Russian and European producers, get an official basis for a claim they previously had to make through advertising. Put the standard reference on your Chinese packaging and in your Xiaohongshu and Douyin content.

Working with GMA on frozen food in China

GMA has been building Chinese-market presence for imported food and beverage brands from Shanghai since 2012. On frozen categories we do the unglamorous parts first: landed cost and channel modelling, distributor and instant-retail placement, then Chinese brand building through Xiaohongshu search, KOC affiliation, Douyin and WeChat private domain. If you produce ice cream and want to know whether China works for your cost structure, talk to us.

Read also:

• Strategic Guide to Export Food Brands in China
• 5 key food fairs in China you should not miss
• CIIE, the China International Import Expo