Economic Watch: Smaller, healthier: trending ice cream on show at China’s exhibition

TIANJIN, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) — Catering to consumers with smarter and smaller packaging designs and ingredients with health benefits, the sweet business of China’s ice cream industry is witnessing new trends in the huge market, according to the Ice Cream China 2024 exhibition going on in north China’s Tianjin Municipality.
The three-day exhibition that kicked off on Thursday has attracted more than 450 domestic and international companies and over 1,000 business people from over 50 countries.
“We have different sizes of coconut shells, which are used as ice cream containers. The Chinese consumers prefer smaller sizes,” said Albert Vega Duran, a Spanish businessman at the exhibition.
He told Xinhua that his company, IBK Tropic, is a Spanish ice cream ingredients supplier that has participated in the event for over 10 years.
“We are always adapting our products to get more orders. We try to talk with as many people as possible in Chinese supermarkets and restaurants to understand what they prefer, and we have found that Chinese people lead or want to lead a low-calorie lifestyle, so ice cream in smaller quantities is a new trend in China,” said Duran.
Held since 1998, the exhibition facilitates international exchanges in the ice cream industry.
Zhang Xiaohong, head of the organizing committee of Ice Cream China, said the fair shows the vitality of China’s ice cream industry and the new trends in the huge market, such as rising health and environmental protection consciousness.
Among a wide array of ice cream products exhibited, innovative packaging and healthy ingredients such as probiotics and dietary fiber get more selling points.
At the exhibition booth of Swedish firm Tetra Pak, a world-leading food processing and packaging company, the company’s ice cream ingredients sales manager, Zheng Gigi, has been constantly surrounded by eager business people for talks.
She said the exhibition indicates the development trends of ice cream products.
“Generally, an ice cream product on the market has a net weight of about 70 grams, and now many ice cream producers have started to launch smaller-sized products of about 40 grams, and some are even as small as a bite-size,” said Zheng.
“Consumers’ preferences are evolving. These smaller-sized products reflect people’s health awareness, and they do not want to indulge too much in sweet food and are inclined to limit their intake of calories,” Zheng added.
The booth of an ice cream branch of Bright Dairy & Food Co., Ltd., one of China’s leading dairy producers, drew crowds of visitors with samples of the company’s new low-sugar series.
Zhang Minyi, the company’s marketing director, said that the new series of products contain 50 percent less sucrose than the company’s traditional products and are packed in smaller cups. Some of the new products add dietary fiber.
The China Green Food Association forecast that China’s ice cream industry has gone on track for rapid development, with the market size to exceed 206.1 billion yuan (about 29.4 billion U.S. dollars) by 2027.
“This is the first time we attend this exhibition, and we would like to find potential partners in China. Here, we can see that the Chinese ice cream market is really competitive with so many local and foreign companies,” said Nataliia Shtyreva with Iceberry, a leading ice cream manufacturer in Russia. ■