零食大王卖不动了：净利暴跌38％、市值蒸发1300亿

This article centers on the major operational crisis facing iconic Taiwanese snack brand Want Want, as well as the company’s ongoing turnaround efforts. Key takeaways include:

1. Core performance: Want Want posted a roughly 6% year-over-year revenue decline and a 38% plunge in net profit attributable to shareholders in the first quarter of FY2026. Its market capitalization has shed more than HK$130 billion from its peak. Founder Tsai Eng-meng has openly admitted the slowdown stems from 30 years of complacency, insufficient innovation, and overreliance on a handful of long-running legacy products.

2. Root causes of the profit slump: Rising costs of core raw materials have pushed up overall expenses, while organizational restructuring and new product launches have driven sharp increases in labor and marketing spending. Want Want’s traditional strength in wholesale distribution channels has been eroded by new formats such as bulk snack chains; these new channels’ low-price positioning has further compressed the company’s profit margins.

3. Want Want’s turnaround initiatives: The company is expanding into low-alcohol beverages, a segment popular among younger consumers, while also branching out into offline coffee shops and Want-Want-themed IP hotels, in a bid to unlock new growth curves through diversification.

This article draws lessons from iconic legacy snack brand Want Want’s recent performance slowdown, offering actionable insights for brand owners of all types.

1. Industry and consumer trends: The landscape of China’s snack industry has shifted dramatically in recent years. E-commerce-native snack brands and bulk snack chains have risen in succession, while traditional wholesale distribution channels are in steady decline. At the same time, the low-alcohol "light drinking" market has expanded rapidly, reaching 65 billion yuan in 2025. Gen Z has become the core consumer group for low-alcohol products, making it a clear growth market.

2. Common pitfalls for established brands: Overreliance on blockbuster legacy products for easy profits, low return on innovation investment with few breakout new products, delayed channel transformation, and squeezed profit margins after entering new channels, which often leads to revenue growth paired with profit declines.

3. Key takeaways: Established brands already enjoy strong brand recognition and existing channel foundations. They should proactively build a second growth curve and leverage existing IP for brand rejuvenation, but must avoid path dependence, continuously align with shifting consumer demand, manage innovation ROI, and prevent excessive spending from eroding profits.

This article analyzes the latest shifts in China’s snack industry and the challenges facing legacy players, offering risk alerts and opportunity insights for snack sellers of all sizes. Key points are as follows:

1. Industry risk warning: The traditional business model relying on blockbuster products plus wholesale distribution is no longer viable. The rise of e-commerce-native brands and bulk snack chains has drained volume from traditional wholesale channels, steadily compressing profit margins for traditional distributors and pushing many out of the market. Sellers should be alert to the risk of traditional channels becoming obsolete.

2. New growth opportunities: The low-alcohol light drinking segment is a clear high-growth market, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 11.3%. 83% of young consumers prefer beverages below 20 ABV, and multiple established snack brands including Want Want have already entered the space, making it a major new growth direction.

3. Guidance for transformation: Sellers should proactively adapt to channel shifts,布局新兴渠道提前，maintain a steady product innovation pace instead of relying on old products long-term, and control operating costs to avoid low returns on large investments.

Drawing on Want Want’s development trajectory and current operating situation, this article offers development insights for factories producing snack and related categories. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Product development and design direction: Today’s consumer market changes rapidly with continuously evolving demand. Factories should not remain reliant on a small set of legacy products long-term. Instead, they need to pursue continuous iterative innovation, proactively align with young consumers’ new demand, and develop scenario-based products such as low-alcohol beverages tailored to young consumers’ light drinking preferences.

2. Underexplored business opportunities: The low-alcohol segment has not yet developed a stable market structure, leaving ample room for new entrants. Legacy factories with existing production capacity and channel foundations can enter this high-growth market. Want Want’s approach of building its own distillery is a notable reference: in-house production lets factories retain control over quality and costs.

3. Transformation insights: Factories need to keep pace with channel shifts. Amid the decline of traditional wholesale channels, they should proactively partner with emerging channels including e-commerce platforms, bulk snack chains and convenience stores, adjust internal organizational structures to match channel changes, and control labor and operating costs stemming from transformation to avoid rising costs from eroding profits.

This article outlines the current development status and core pain points of China’s snack industry, pointing out business opportunities for service providers serving the snack sector. Key points are as follows:

1. Industry development trends: The overall size of China’s snack market continues to expand, but the sector is undergoing a full restructuring. A large number of established legacy brands are facing transformation pressure and are all rushing to build second growth curves. Brand rejuvenation, channel transformation, and new product incubation are currently core demands for many legacy enterprises.

2. Core pain points of industry clients: Most established legacy snack brands lack strong product innovation capability and have low success rates for new product launches. They also face declining performance in traditional channels and lack of operational experience in new channels, and often see surging operating costs and extremely low ROI during transformation.

3. Business opportunities for service providers: Service providers can build offerings around the transformation pain points of legacy enterprises, providing services including new product research and incubation, new channel operational consulting, brand rejuvenation marketing, and organizational change consulting. They can also develop specialized services such as brand positioning and channel connection for the fast-growing cross-segment low-alcohol track, to capture the dividends from industry-wide transformation.

This article analyzes the development shifts across different channels in the snack industry, offering reference for the operation and development of snack-related platform operators. Key points are as follows:

1. Latest demands from brand owners: Traditional legacy snack brands are accelerating their shift away from traditional wholesale channels to emerging channels, and demand for partnerships with bulk snack chains, e-commerce platforms, and convenience stores has risen sharply. Emerging channels have become the core driver of incremental growth for brand owners.

2. Latest shifts in channel landscape: The bulk snack channel has grown into a major incremental channel for the snack industry, delivering a significant shock to traditional channels. These platforms hold pricing power and need more established brands with strong recognition to enrich their SKUs and attract consumers.

3. Directions for platform operation optimization: Platform operators can capitalize on the transformation wave of legacy brands, carry out targeted investment promotion, roll out cooperation policies tailored to brand owners’ demands, and balance channel pricing with brand owners’ profit margins to maintain long-term healthy partnerships. E-commerce platforms can also launch targeted traffic support services to meet brand owners’ demands for cross-sector expansion and IP rejuvenation.

This article uses the performance crisis of iconic leading domestic brand Want Want as a case study to illustrate the ongoing transformation of China’s snack industry, providing a rich research sample for industrial analysis. Key content is as follows:

1. New industrial trends: China’s snack industry is currently undergoing channel restructuring. E-commerce and bulk snack chains are gradually replacing traditional wholesale channels to become the mainstream. Leading legacy brands broadly face growth bottlenecks and are increasingly branching out to build second growth curves, with low-alcohol light drinking becoming a popular direction for cross-sector expansion by snack brands.

2. New industrial challenges: Leading legacy brands broadly suffer from path dependence, relying on blockbuster legacy products for profits for years and lagging behind in innovation and transformation. During transformation, they face multiple structural challenges including rising raw material costs, surging operating expenses, and profit compression from new channels, and cross-sector expansion rarely becomes a core driver of performance in the short term.

3. Research value: This case is particularly well-suited for research on the transformation paths of traditional iconic domestic brands, the lifecycle of the blockbuster product business model, and the impact of channel restructuring on legacy brands. It also serves as a typical sample for research on overall landscape shifts in the snack industry, helping summarize lessons and insights for traditional brand transformation.