沃尔玛 把药食同源装进一日五餐

This article examines the current development status and consumer trends of the "medicine-food homology" (MFH) category against the backdrop of Walmart's private label, Wuji Xian, launching a new line of MFH products. General readers will gain the following key insights:

1. Chinese consumers' demand for healthy eating has evolved: from prioritizing low sugar and zero additives in the past, they now seek targeted nutrition and MFH-based wellness. MFH is no longer a niche wellness concept limited to traditional Chinese medicine pharmacies—it has entered mass adoption across all daily eating scenarios, with a rapidly expanding selection of related products.

2. Wuji Xian's new MFH series covers multiple segmented scenarios including three main meals, late-night snacks for overtime workers, and holiday gifting. Over 100 products will roll out this year, allowing consumers to choose options tailored to their specific needs, such as Hericium erinaceus four-mushroom toast for breakfast, and double-flavor turtle jelly for night owls and hot pot lovers.

3. Far from being a pure marketing gimmick, the series was co-developed with century-old time-honored brands based on classic ancient prescriptions. It features strictly verified ingredient dosages and adheres to double quality control standards, offering greater assurance of product professionalism and safety.

This article outlines the latest consumer trends in the MFH category, as well as actionable insights for product development and brand building that brand owners can reference:

1. Consumer trends have shifted clearly: by 2025, consumer demand for health has pivoted to targeted nutrition, third-party scientific validation, and MFH-infused products. Currently, most MFH products are concentrated in the beverage category, with most offerings only catering to casual trial use, leaving significant untapped potential in multi-scenario daily product development.

2. Brands can adopt a systematic development approach: break through category boundaries, develop products based on segmented consumer scenarios, cover all needs across five daily meals, use the "one prescription, multiple product formats" strategy to derive multiple product types from a single classic formula, and plan new product launch cadence around the traditional Chinese principle of "eating seasonal food" to improve development efficiency.

3. Brands can learn from Wuji Xian's approach to building professional credibility: partner with qualified time-honored pharmaceutical enterprises to leverage their advantages in ingredient traceability and processing techniques, establish a dual quality control system, and strictly control ingredient dosages. This prevents MFH from becoming a hollow marketing concept and boosts consumer trust in the brand.

This article summarizes policy direction, market opportunities and practical experience in the MFH track for sellers' reference:

1. On the policy front, nine government departments including the Ministry of Commerce have explicitly encouraged the development of private labels in the retail industry. Currently, 106 substances are included in China's official catalog of MFH materials, giving the track clear policy support.

2. In terms of market opportunities, consumer demand for MFH products has shifted from casual trial use to daily wellness. The existing market is concentrated in a small number of categories such as beverages, with insufficient supply of multi-scenario daily products, creating clear market gaps and new growth opportunities.

3. For practical operations: avoid blindly following hot categories. First conduct demand insight based on your core user profile, then align product development with identified needs; adopt a scenario-based and systematic development route to cover diverse consumer needs; partner with professional time-honored brands to control quality, avoid the trap of concept-only marketing, build differentiated competitiveness, and mitigate the risk of homogenized competition.

This article outlines changing production demands and new business opportunities for MFH products, for reference by factories targeting the healthy food track:

1. Production and design demands have changed: downstream brands and retailers no longer only need large single SKUs. Instead, they require multi-format products developed for different consumption scenarios, with significantly higher requirements for ingredient quality, processing techniques, and ingredient dosage accuracy that align with classic ancient prescriptions and professional quality control standards.

2. Clear business opportunities have emerged: leading retail platform Walmart is accelerating the layout of private-label MFH products, planning to launch more than 100 SKUs this year. This has sharply increased demand for cooperation with high-quality producers and supply chains, bringing stable orders and partnership opportunities for factories.

3. Key takeaways for growth: factories can strengthen their advantages in ingredient traceability, processing techniques, and standardized production, actively pursue cooperation opportunities with retailers and time-honored brands, participate deeply in full-link quality control, build production barriers to enter the high-growth MFH track, and leverage the channel advantages of retail partners to drive growth.

This article sorts out industry trends in healthy food and retail private labels, as well as client pain points and viable service directions, for service providers' reference:

1. Industry development trends: MFH has transitioned from a niche wellness concept to a daily dietary staple, becoming a major growth track for the food industry. Meanwhile, retail players are broadly seeking to build differentiated product capabilities, and developing private labels has become an industry consensus, driving continuous growth in demand for third-party professional services.

2. Core client pain points: Most brands developing MFH products are limited by their existing category portfolios, can only launch a small number of SKUs, and easily fall into homogenized competition by following trends. Additionally, most brands lack professional MFH expertise, making it difficult to control ingredient quality and formula compliance, which often leaves MFH as nothing more than a hollow marketing concept that fails to earn consumer trust.

3. Potential service directions: Service providers can build out offerings around segmented scenario product development, MFH supply chain quality control, compliant conversion of classic ancient prescriptions, and end-to-end private label development. These services help clients deliver systematic innovation to meet consumers' demand for daily MFH-integrated diets.

This article presents new ideas for retail platforms to build differentiated product capabilities and develop private labels, for platform operators' reference:

1. The core task of today's retail industry transformation is building differentiated product capabilities to escape homogenized price competition. National policy explicitly encourages retail platforms to develop private labels, making private labels a key pathway for platforms to achieve differentiated competition.

2. When developing private labels, platforms can learn from Wuji Xian's approach: avoid the old route of simple white-labeling to sell cheaper alternatives to name brands. Instead, conduct in-depth demand insight based on the platform's own core user profile, identify a matching product theme, and develop products accordingly to avoid blindly following popular categories.

3. For operations and supply chain management: adopt a systematic and large-scale innovation approach, develop full-category products for segmented consumption scenarios, and use the "one prescription, multiple formats" strategy to improve development efficiency. At the same time, partner with professional institutions such as century-old time-honored brands to establish a dual quality control system that oversees ingredient quality and production processes, mitigates the risk of hollow concept-only unprofessional products, and builds real competitive barriers.

This article sorts out new trends in the current food retail industry and presents a new case study for private label innovation, offering high reference value for industry research:

1. New industry trends: MFH is transitioning from a marketing concept to a daily dietary pattern. Consumer demand upgrade has reshaped the competitive logic of retail private labels: the old model of simple white-labeling for cheaper alternatives to established brands is no longer viable. Today, the industry competes on retailers' end-to-end systematic operation capabilities.

2. New emerging industry problems: Past MFH product development has been heavily concentrated in a small number of categories such as beverages, making it difficult for MFH to integrate into daily consumption and become a long-term dietary pattern. Meanwhile, most private label development has followed trends and suffered from homogenization, lacking core competitive barriers and failing to build clear differentiated advantages.

3. Reference for a new business model: Walmart Wuji Xian's integrated "customer demand insight + systematic product development + supply chain resource integration" model provides a new benchmark for retail private label innovation. It confirms that granular scenario-based innovation aligned with consumer trends is the core of future retail product competition, offering important insights for research on retail industry transformation.