(Text by Huo Dongyang, Editor by Zhang Guangkai)

In November 2025, Dalin Food Group officially announced that Xu Yangyang, the daughter of the founder Xu Shihui, has taken over as the group's president, fully managing this "food empire".

The path of succession took Xu Yangyang 17 years. Since returning from her studies in the UK in 2008, Xu Yangyang has been working at Dalin Food, starting from the position of workshop director, going through various grassroots positions such as production coordination, product development, and brand operations, until she became a member of the executive board and vice president of the group.

She inherited an empire with annual revenue exceeding 20 billion yuan at its peak, with 2.8 million terminal points, but also a major player facing continuous performance decline and the impact of channel transformation.

"Follow the strategy" created a commercial miracle

Xu Shihui's entrepreneurial story is a legend of a generation of Fujian entrepreneurs.

In 1989, Xu Shihui invested all his assets to buy a second-hand biscuit production line, rented a stone house in his hometown of Hui'an, and established the predecessor of Dalin Food, "Hui'an Meili Food Factory". In an era when snacks were not abundant, Xu Shihui seized the market pain point by designing individual packaging for biscuits, allowing the "Meili" brand biscuits to quickly open up the market.

In 1992, Xu Shihui founded Fujian Hui'an Dalin Food Co., Ltd., built the first self-owned property base, and the "Dalin" brand was officially launched. However, with the entry of brands such as Wangwang, Lay's, and Oreo into China, Dalin faced great pressure.

Facing foreign brands, Xu Shihui formed a unique "Dalin model": following hit products + celebrity endorsements + affordable coverage + channel penetration.

In 2002, in response to the relatively high price of Korean Oreo Pies, Dalin Food developed Dalin Garden chocolate pies and egg yolk pies, which were priced at two-thirds of the former's cost, and invited Xu Qing, who played Ren Yingying in the popular TV series "The Legend of the Condor Heroes", to be the spokesperson, making the product quickly open up the market with the slogan "Round round Dalin Garden".

Afterward, Dalin Food repeatedly replicated this successful approach: Good Taste targeted Mondelez, Kebi targeted Lay's/Pepsi, Heqi Zheng targeted Wanglaoji/Addy, Lehu targeted Red Bull, and Meibei Chen imitated the leading short-life bread brand Taoli Bread.

As a follower, Dalin Food used low prices to participate in competition and capture the market while increasing marketing investment to enhance awareness.

Xu Shihui's marketing strategy was very simple and brutal: hire whoever was popular. In addition to Xu Qing, celebrities such as Jay Chou, Liu Ruoying, Gao Yuanyuan, Chen Daoming, and Sun Li have all endorsed Dalin products.

Although Dalin achieved market recognition through heavy marketing, its market share increase was more due to the price advantage. According to reports, Dalin products usually entered the market with a "cutting" strategy that was one-third or even half the price of the target products.

Xu Shihui's secret to low prices without compromising quality lies in building factories across the country. The widespread distribution of factories greatly reduced logistics costs, allowing Dalin to sell to dealers at a price 10% or more lower than competitors. This price concession further strengthened the interest integration with channel merchants. It was reported that dealer revenue once accounted for more than 90% of the company's total revenue.

With the strong down-to-earth channels and dealer system, and the strategy of "similar to hit products but cheaper," Dalin Food's seven core brands once covered 2.8 million terminals and a channel network covering 3,000 county-level markets. At its peak, every new product launch by Dalin Food could quickly rank among the top three in the industry, becoming the preferred choice for many townships and third- and fourth-tier markets for cost-effectiveness.

In 2015, Xu Yangyang led the push for Dalin Food to go public in Hong Kong, and this IPO set a record as the largest in the global consumer goods sector that year, opening up capital channels for Dalin.

Xu Shihui and Xu Yangyang ringing the bell at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

After listing, Dalin Food's market value reached billions of Hong Kong dollars, and Xu Shihui was the richest person in Fujian for three consecutive years from 2016 to 2019. In 2018, at the highest stock price, the Xu Shihui family had a wealth of 62.79 billion yuan, surpassing Zhao Qinghou of Wahaha and topping the list of the richest in the Chinese food industry.

In 2017, Dalin Food's net profit exceeded the combined total of Kangshifu, Unicharm, and Wangwang. At the 2019 performance briefing, Xu Shihui stated that the company aimed to build four hundred-billion-yuan brands, including Dalin Garden, Doubenchou, Meibei Chen, and Lehu, by 2025.

Difficulties under change

However, the business model that made Dalin successful is now facing severe challenges in the new environment.

From financial data, Dalin Food's "downhill" began in 2022. According to the report, the company's revenue reached a historical peak of 22.294 billion yuan in 2021, but dropped rapidly to 19.957 billion yuan in 2022.

When performance started to waver, Dalin Food initiated a private listing in 2023. At the time, the company stated in its announcement that "due to the company's stock price remaining in a relatively low range for a long time and limited trading volume, it did not fully reflect the true value of the group."

This move was also seen by the outside world as a proactive contraction and strategic adjustment by Dalin Food under growth pressure, but the subsequent performance results were not optimistic.

According to rankings such as "Top 100 Enterprises in Fujian" and "Top 100 Private Enterprises in Fujian," Dalin Food Group's revenue in 2023 and 2024 was 18.86 billion yuan and 18.07 billion yuan respectively. After going private, the flexible strategies did not boost Dalin Food's performance.

In recent years, Dalin Food failed to grasp the trends of e-commerce, live streaming, community group buying, and bulk snack sales.

Dalin Food's layout in online channels was significantly lagging. In 2020, its e-commerce sales accounted for only 6.8%, while companies like Sanzhi Songzi and Liangpin Pu Zi rose to prominence by leveraging the internet. In offline channels, bulk stores like "Snacks Are Nice" directly cooperate with factories and reduce intermediate links, achieving extremely high price competitiveness, forming a "low-end strike" against Dalin's cost-effective products.

Channels were the strongest moat for Dalin Food, but this moat is drying up: the traditional inventory model is no longer aligned with modern demand.

It is known that Dalin has long adopted an inventory model for dealers. This strategy contributed significantly to the company's early performance, but as product quality declined and terminal acceptance decreased, it caused dealer inventory buildup and thin profits, even leading to cooperation breakdowns.

At the same time, some dealers reported that the online product prices sometimes fell below the offline purchase price, causing serious squeezing of channel profits, further discouraging the channel.

Xu Yangyang had already realized the limitations of the single imitation strategy and tried to promote product innovation. In 2017, she led the launch of "Doubenchou," entering the plant-based market. The product's sales exceeded 1 billion yuan within a year of its launch, becoming a growth engine for Dalin Food.

As an attempt by Dalin to shed its "copycat" image, Doubenchou started brightly, and the company invested 2.5 billion yuan in promotion and marketing over three years. However, it lacked sustained momentum. According to the 2022 annual report, Doubenchou's sales revenue increased by only 0.9% compared to the previous year, almost stagnant.

New products introduced in recent years, such as Chaoye sugar-free tea and Heqizheng "Yi Ji Shui," have not exceeded 1,000 sales on e-commerce platforms in the past 30 days, showing no potential for "hit" status. A source informed the media that in the past two years, Dalin Food's beverage business sales nearly "half," and "the lowest point may have been about 60% of the peak in 2019."

By the end of 2025, the goal of "four hundred billion" was no longer mentioned, and Xu Shihui handed the company over to Xu Yangyang.

Succession and Change

Currently, the Chinese consumer market is undergoing a new round of major changes. On one hand, Dalin faces internal issues such as outdated channels and products; on the other hand, more and more top brands are using price competition to challenge its core competitiveness.

Xu Yangyang faces a market that is no longer the one where her father Xu Shihui started his business, a market with insufficient supply and a single channel, but rather a completely new battlefield that has been reshaped by e-commerce, dominated by the new generation of consumers, and surrounded by global competition.

At the critical turning point of the enterprise life cycle, the second-generation succession is both power transfer and another entrepreneurship for the company. What is currently before Xu Yangyang is to find a new balance between brand rejuvenation, product innovation, and globalization, and reshape the growth curve.

Xu Yangyang once mentioned her succession mission in an interview: "The mission of the first generation of entrepreneurs is to let the company survive and grow, completing an extraordinary transformation from zero to one. While the mission of our generation is to drive the company to achieve a qualitative change from one to N."

The shift from "imitator" to "innovator" is the core of this qualitative change.

Xu Yangyang is seeking breakthroughs from two directions.

First, promoting brand rejuvenation. The previous generation solved the "availability" issue, while Xu Yangyang focuses on "value redefinition," accurately capturing the trend of consumer needs shifting from "material satisfaction" to "health, scenario, and emotion" multi-dimensional upgrades, pushing products from "delicious" to "value complexification."

At the same time, she is driving the company's business logic towards "demand-driven," letting products become carriers connecting users' emotions, and transforming the relationship between the company and consumers from "buying and selling" to "coexistence," reshaping the commercial value transmission path.

Second, accelerating the overseas strategy. Going public in Hong Kong should have driven internationalization, but until its delisting, Dalin had limited progress in international market expansion, products, channels, and production bases.

However, in 2023, the year of delisting, Xu Shihui proposed an overseas strategy, which was executed by Xu Yangyang. Dalin Food mainly targets the Southeast Asian market, where there are a large number of young people, high price sensitivity, and rapid growth in demand for snack foods, resembling the Chinese market several decades ago.

Dalin Food's overseas expansion still maintains the characteristics of "heavy investment" and "heavy assets."

It is reported that the company has now formed a layout of four overseas production bases in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia, with the Indonesian factory considered the "starting point" of the global strategy, with capacity to radiate the entire Southeast Asian market and expand to the Middle East region.

Dalin Food's Indonesian factory

Today, Dalin Food stands at a new crossroads. The "follow strategy" and channel advantages left by Xu Shihui are fading, and Xu Yangyang faces a new battlefield full of challenges but also opportunities.

Looking at the global consumer market, food giants in developed countries generally have experienced decades or even centuries of cycles. Facing the dramatic changes in the Chinese consumer market, Dalin Food's transformation is far from complete, and Xu Yangyang needs to inject new genes into this 36-year-old company.

Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7574343257073680911/

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