单品月销破亿！从黑蒜冰淇淋到二八酱奶茶 600年老字号凭什么俘获年轻人？

This article shares the core lessons behind the 600-year-old Chinese time-honored brand Liubiju's success in breaking into the mainstream and capturing younger consumers, as well as building multiple 100-million-yuan-level blockbuster products. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Core thesis: The best inheritance for a time-honored brand is creative continuation. Century-old brand equity should be treated as a tool to serve current business, not a shrine idol to be worshiped. Brands cannot rest on their laurels and live off their legacy.

2. Cross-industry collaboration approach: Liubiju avoids shallow brand co-branding that only erodes brand value, and instead focuses on in-depth co-creation. It provides authentic core raw materials and brand endorsement, while partners take charge of production and sales. Internally, Liubiju opens green channels for innovative collaborations, enabling the full process from initial对接 to new product launch in just three months.

3. Experience in innovation and trust building: Liubiju conducts low-cost small-scale tests to validate demand for scenario-based innovation before scaling up across channels gradually, integrating traditional ingredients into consumption scenarios familiar to young consumers. In response to trust concerns, it reframes traditional craft through modern quantitative testing standards, upholding quality commitments without clinging to outdated practices.

Through Liubiju's successful transformation case, this article provides actionable insights for the youth-oriented transformation of time-honored and traditional food brands. Core content is as follows:

1. Consumption trend assessment: Young consumers are willing to pay for authentic traditional flavors, as long as brands integrate these flavors into consumption scenarios aligned with young people's habits. The brand equity accumulated by time-honored brands is an untapped gold mine, not a burden on growth.

2. Rules for cross-industry collaboration: Brands should avoid one-off shallow co-branding, and focus on in-depth product co-creation instead. Collaborations should follow three screening criteria: strategic alignment that keeps activities within the brand's core category boundaries, resource complementarity that benefits both parties, and value alignment that preserves cooperation boundaries and avoids mutual interference.

3. Product and brand building approach: Brands can turn their original core raw materials into reusable flavor modules, and extend them into young consumers' favorite new categories such as milk tea and ice cream. In the face of inherent consumer skepticism about the category, brands should respond directly with solutions, and rebuild consumer trust with modern, verifiable standards.

This article points out new market opportunities for food track sellers, and shares replicable practical experience alongside risk warnings. Core content is as follows:

1. New incremental opportunity: There is huge untapped market space for integrating traditional authentic flavors into young consumption scenarios. The market has already seen proven successes: Liubiju's co-branded sesame sauce konjac "vegetarian tripe" hit 100 million yuan in sales in a single month, and products like "Erba sauce milk tea" have become viral hits across the country. The track boasts enormous growth potential.

2. Cooperation opportunities and models: Sellers can carry out product co-creation collaborations with time-honored brands that hold core category advantages. Time-honored brands provide core raw materials and trusted brand endorsement, while sellers take charge of production, channels and sales. This model reduces the trust cost of new product development, and helps brands open up new markets by leveraging the influence of time-honored brands.

3. Practical experience and risk warnings: New product development should start with small-scale scenario testing, and only scale up investment gradually after collecting real user feedback, to reduce trial-and-error risk. Sellers should beware of the risks of shallow brand co-branding: such collaborations usually only generate temporary buzz, fail to retain users, and may even erode brand value due to out-of-control quality control.

Taking Liubiju's transformation practice as an example, this article offers valuable actionable insights for the transformation and upgrading of traditional food factories. Core takeaways are as follows:

1. Product production and design direction: Today's young consumers recognize traditional authentic flavors, but require traditional ingredients to be integrated into new consumption scenarios. Factories can leverage their original core category advantages to develop reusable core flavor modules that fit the production needs of different new categories, opening up new growth space.

2. New business cooperation opportunities: Traditional factories with core category advantages can open up product co-creation collaborations, output core raw materials and brand endorsement to external partners, and expand their B2B growth curve based on existing technical accumulation. Liubiju has relied on this model to keep its sesame sauce ranked first in national sales for three consecutive years.

3. Insights on digitalization and transformation: Factories do not need to pursue disruptive category innovation. Instead, they should uphold quality bottom lines, adjust internal mechanisms flexibly, open green channels for innovative collaborations to improve decision-making efficiency. In the face of consumer trust questions about traditional categories, factories can upgrade traditional craft with modern testing technology, respond directly to concerns, and achieve brand upgrading.

This article sorts out the transformation pain points and development trends of the current time-honored food industry, and provides clear business direction reference for food industry service providers. Core content is as follows:

1. Industry development trends: Among more than 1,400 China Time-honored Brand enterprises across the country, nearly half are underperforming and continue to lose money. A large number of brands face problems of brand aging and sluggish growth. Leading brands have already explored mature transformation paths, and the whole industry has strong demand for innovation and transformation.

2. Core pain points of industry clients: Common pain points for time-honored brand transformation include high risk of cross-industry co-branding failures, widespread issues such as poor quality control, low user retention, and brand value erosion from over-co-branding. They also face consumer trust crises in traditional categories, rigid internal decision-making mechanisms that cannot keep up with innovation pace, and difficulties in identifying clear transformation directions.

3. Actionable solution directions: Service providers can build matching platforms connecting time-honored brands and emerging consumer brands to facilitate product co-creation collaborations; they can provide low-cost scenario innovation testing services for time-honored brands, and deliver a complete methodology from testing validation to large-scale scaling; they can also help time-honored brands build a quality trust evidence chain, "translate" traditional craft into modern language, and address consumer trust concerns.

Combined with Liubiju's transformation and collaboration case, this article shares valuable insights for the operation and development of food retail platforms and cross-industry collaboration platforms. Core content is as follows:

1. Merchant demand and investment opportunities: Most time-honored brands with core advantages have strong demand for youth-oriented transformation, and need platforms to connect them with young consumers and emerging channels. When platforms bring in time-honored brands for in-depth collaboration, they can build differentiated product and traffic advantages. Liubiju's collaborations with Hema, 7 Fresh by JD.com and Universal Beijing Resort have all successfully created viral blockbusters, attracting large volumes of young traffic.

2. Operation and management direction: Platforms can support the innovative attempts of time-honored brands, help them carry out small-scale scenario innovation tests, provide validation resources across different channels in phases, and reduce the risk of innovation trial and error. They can also match in-platform merchants with time-honored brands for product co-creation, integrate the resource advantages of both parties, and jointly build blockbuster products.

3. Risk avoidance points: Platforms should guide both collaboration parties to clarify cooperation boundaries, remind time-honored brands not to accept cross-industry collaborations that go beyond their core category scope, and avoid eroding brand value through excessive co-branding. They should also clarify the rights and responsibilities of both parties, prevent one party from overstepping and interfering in the other's business which damages cooperation trust, and ensure stable collaboration.

This article sorts out Liubiju's transformation practices in recent years, summarizes new experience and new models for time-honored brands to break out of the brand aging predicament, and offers high reference value for research on the time-honored brand industry. Core content is as follows:

1. New industry trends and problems: The overall development of China's time-honored brands is not optimistic: nearly half of the brands continue to lose money, a large number of brands have become "zombie brands" with only an empty name, and the brand aging predicament remains difficult to solve. However, leading time-honored brands have explored new paths of creative inheritance, and against the backdrop of the rise of Chinese flavors, the brand equity of time-honored brands is being reactivated.

2. Summary of the new business model: Liubiju has developed a new product co-creation model distinct from traditional brand licensing and co-branding. Its core is that the time-honored brand provides core raw materials and brand endorsement, while partners take charge of production and sales. The case also yields three collaboration screening criteria: strategic alignment, resource complementarity, and value alignment, as well as a scenario innovation methodology of small-step testing and gradual scaling.

3. Research implications: This article puts forward the core view that time-honored brands should treat brand equity as a tool rather than an idol to be worshipped. It concludes three core arguments: cooperation boundaries are more important than cooperation partners, scenario innovation takes priority over product innovation, and trust rebuilding is more urgent than expanding reach. These conclusions also offer reference value for policy research on time-honored brand transformation. Relaxing internal institutional constraints and opening up collaborations to activate brand equity will be an important direction for the future.