I. Status Quo of China's Leisure Food Industry

 

With the prosperity and development of China's tourism industry, leisure food has entered a new stage of continuous improvement and innovation. The consumption of snack foods is very fast. In recent years, the size of China's snack food market has grown at a geometric rate, which is 20 percentage points higher than the average growth rate of the food market. The status of the food market in China is increasingly important.

 

Authoritative data show that: In 2009, leisure food manufacturing industry generated industrial output value of 436.45 billion yuan, an increase of 27.53%; realized sales revenue of 430.403 billion yuan, an increase of 31.39%; realized profits of 11.777 billion yuan, an increase of 52.87%.

 

As the snack food industry grows in size, the variety and categories have also increased significantly. At present, there are several major categories of snack foods in the market: cereals, puffed kernels, fried potatoes, fried cereals, sugar, meat and fish, and dried fruits and vegetables. However, the output of Chinese snack foods is far from that of foreign developed countries. In particular, compared to the United States, the world’s largest consumer of casual food, the per capita consumption gap between China and the United States is about 150 times. On the other hand, China's major leisure food manufacturers have concentrated on the development of cereal puffing products, which has resulted in a single variety of products and fierce competition. Due to the relatively weak technical strength, the flavor of current snack foods is not comparable to that of similar international products. In addition to several major joint ventures in China, many state-owned and small-sized manufacturers have made the packaging and quality of snack foods relatively rough. Due to lack of technical strength and backwardness of food machinery, many developments of suitable age products are still blank.