靠酱油称霸的龟甲万 也是日本豆乳第一？40多种口味挑花眼 甚至还有可乐味！

This article outlines how Kikkoman, a century-old Japanese soy sauce brand, pulled off a turnaround to become the top player in Japan’s stagnant soy milk market. Its key strategies are summarized below:

1. Flavor innovation was the core breakthrough. After entering the declining soy milk market, Kikkoman developed over 40 different flavors covering fruit, dessert, and beverage categories, even launching niche novelty flavors like cola and garlic. The goal was to reposition soy milk from a niche health-focused drink to a mainstream daily beverage, attracting new consumers who previously did not drink soy milk.

2. Beyond flavor innovation, Kikkoman actively expanded consumption scenarios for soy milk, extending its use beyond standalone beverages to ice cream, hot pot bases, coffee latte bases and more. It also sourced inspiration from creative homemade recipes shared by consumers, turning these ideas into official marketing campaigns to integrate soy milk into everyday life.

3. To match modern consumers’ demand for targeted nutrition, Kikkoman launched specialized products focused on calcium, iron, and soy protein supplementation, with clearly labeled nutrition information to meet the needs of different consumer groups.

This article breaks down how Kikkoman reactivated a declining category and became the market leader, offering key lessons for product development and marketing for food brands:

1. On consumer trends: Japan is currently experiencing its fourth soy milk boom, with production hitting a record high in the first three quarters of 2025. The core growth driver is rising consumer interest in soy protein. China’s soy milk category is also at an inflection point, transitioning from a traditional offering to a younger, more diverse product, with significant room for growth.

2. On product development: When a category’s original health positioning triggers consumer trust issues and market decline, brands can step outside the existing category framework, pursue a beverage-focused cross-category strategy, develop a wide range of novel flavors, and incorporate input from non-core consumers to rapidly iterate products and align with market demand.

3. On brand marketing: Instead of forcing consumer education, brands can proactively source creative use cases from consumers and turn them into official marketing campaigns. Through pop-up events, in-store tastings, and packaging optimized to highlight core selling points, products can naturally integrate into consumers’ existing daily dietary routines.

This article梳理了日本豆乳市场的发展变化，能给国内植物基饮品、豆浆相关卖家提供增长机会和经验参考:

1. On growth opportunities: Japan’s soy milk market is currently in a high-growth fourth boom, with production hitting a record high. China’s soy milk category is also at a key inflection point, transitioning from traditional consumption to new consumption patterns, with large unmet demand for younger positioning and diversified scenarios, creating substantial growth room.

2. Key takeaways: Sellers can follow Kikkoman’s example to step outside the fixed positioning of soy milk as a healthy breakfast drink, spark consumer curiosity with a diverse range of novel flavors, and expand into non-beverage consumption scenarios to acquire new customers. At the same time, brands can respond to consumer demand for targeted nutrition by launching specialized products focused on different nutrients, and optimize packaging to clearly communicate selling points.

3. Risk warning: While novelty flavors attract attention, their market acceptance is uncertain. Kikkoman’s garlic-flavored soy milk, for example, saw poor sales. Sellers should control costs when testing flavor innovation, and prioritize developing flavors that already have an established consumer base.

Kikkoman, a soy sauce giant, pulled off a successful cross-category turnaround to become Japan’s top soy milk producer, offering key insights for traditional food factories looking to expand their product lines and transform:

1. On product design and demand: Modern consumers are no longer satisfied with traditional, single product formats, and prefer products with diverse flavors that fit multiple consumption scenarios. When developing new products, factories can step outside existing category frameworks, and source inspiration from consumers’ favorite everyday flavors and common dietary scenarios.

2. On business opportunities: The plant-based beverage industry is currently in a growth cycle. In both Japan and China, consumer attention to soy protein and targeted nutrition continues to rise. Traditional soy processing factories can enter the packaged soy milk and modern soy milk track to unlock new revenue growth.

3. Transformation insights: When developing new products, factories can proactively incorporate ideas from end consumers, rapidly respond to and implement creative user demands to align with market needs and reduce the risk of new product failure. Factories can also follow Kikkoman’s example of rolling out innovation incrementally, from test marketing to scaled推广, to control trial-and-error costs.

This article outlines the development of Japan’s soy milk industry and the path to revitalizing mature categories, offering industry and operational insights for food-related service providers:

1. On industry trends: After four waves of development, the soy milk category has evolved from an early niche beverage centered on the functional benefit of soy isoflavones to a mainstream drink adapted for multiple daily scenarios. Flavor innovation, scenario expansion, and nutrition refinement are now the core drivers of category growth.

2. Core pain points of brand clients: Many mature, stagnant categories face similar challenges: their original core selling points have triggered consumer trust crises, markets continue to decline, core audiences are aging, and brands struggle to acquire new users and identify new growth directions.

3. Recommended solutions: Service providers can support brands to step outside their original category positioning, pursue product innovation targeting the general daily beverage market, help brands convert creative consumer use cases into marketing selling points, and adjust product positioning and marketing strategies to align with modern consumer demand for targeted nutrition, helping traditional categories reactivate growth.

The development of Japan’s soy milk market and Kikkoman’s innovative practices offer valuable insights for operations and merchant recruitment for food retail platforms and plant-based-focused platforms:

1. Core demand from brand merchants: New innovative products, especially novelty flavors, need concentrated exposure scenarios to reach consumers and spark curiosity. Kikkoman, for example, once displayed 36 different flavors of soy milk in vending machines at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, generating massive public attention. Platforms can provide innovative brands with this type of concentrated exposure to help new products break through.

2. Optimizations for platform operations: For brands revitalizing traditional categories, platforms can offer dedicated traffic support, and co-host interactive activities such as flavor voting with brands to boost consumer engagement and help brands reach more potential users.

3. Risk mitigation: Novel innovative products carry high uncertainty in market acceptance. When introducing these products, platforms can first run small-scale tests, and adjust resource allocation based on market feedback to reduce trial-and-error risk.

This article outlines the development of Japan’s soy milk industry and Kikkoman’s practice of revitalizing a stagnant category, offering high reference value for industrial research:

1. New industry trends: Japan’s soy milk industry is currently in its fourth wave of growth, with 2025 production hitting a record high. Growth drivers have continuously evolved: from early hype around functional concepts, to flavor innovation and scenario expansion in the third wave, to the current fourth wave driven by rising consumer demand for soy protein. China’s soy milk industry is also at a key stage of transition from traditional to new consumption patterns, making it worthy of in-depth research.

2. New common industry challenges: Many stagnant traditional categories face similar困境: original core selling points have triggered consumer trust crises, markets continue to decline, audiences are aging, and unlocking new growth curves has become a shared industry-wide challenge.

3. Worthy of research on business model innovation: Kikkoman stepped outside its original category positioning, pursued a beverage-focused cross-category expansion strategy, and reactivated the stagnant category through large-scale flavor innovation combined with full-scenario penetration. This model offers a典型样本 for research on traditional food category revitalization.