Even for the dairy industry, China is now more a market of the present than of the future and is proving to be quite far removed from the Asian giant’s culinary traditions. This is demonstrated by Granarolo‘s decision to open a sales office in Shanghai, which constitutes the first step towards further investment and development possibility in the area.
“Our group is working to bring various products to the Chinese market, for example, UHT milk and infant formulas”, states Filippo Marchi, marketing director for Gruppo Granarolo, “but we are seeing a growing interest in fresh Italian cheeses such as mozzarella, as well as aged cheeses such as Grano and DOP status Parmesan, which are in pole position with distributors requesting more and more from us. The regions where we are focusing our energy are the areas of Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, HangHou, Guangzhou and Xi’An”.
The Chinese consumer has high expectations regarding food quality and this could be an advantage for our native businesses, like Granarolo, for example, which has two production sites abroad, in France to be precise, and in 2013 recorded a turnover of 993 million Euros. “The Chinese market is looking for guaranteed food quality and safety”, confirms Marchi, “and we are able to offer this to them. We have designed all of our Italian establishments to respond fully to the requests and needs imposed by local regulatory authorities. We are already present in the wide Chinese distribution within the two big cities and there is of course much more room for growth.”
The numbers confirm this: in the last five years China has registered an increase of more than 20% in the average rate of imported food products and according to some estimates it could become the biggest market for general food imports by 2018, carrying a value of more than 80 billion dollars”.