During the 2016 Spring Festival holidays, a wide range of overseas food, from Japanese cookies and US nuts to Australian cherries and New Zealand seafood, has appeared on the tables of Chinese families. China's food imports have been growing for years, and the period just before the Chinese New Year has become the peak season for overseas food purchases. According to one online retailer, with sales during this time accounting for about one-third of total sales for the year, China's growing demand for overseas food products offers a good opportunity for foreign exporters. For example, Australian cherry growers could ship eight times more fruit to China if they had greater access to the country's market, one industry representative said.

On Saturday during the 2016 Spring Festival, consumers purchase imported food at a shopping mall in North China's Tianjin Municipality. Photo: CFP

Three days before the 2016 Spring Festival holidays began, Pan Xiao'er splurged on a single box of Akai Bonshi Coconut Choco Sand cookies from Japan.

The cookies had stuck in the 36-year-old woman's mind since she first tasted them on a trip to Japan three years ago.

Pan, who lives in Yuyao, a small city in East China's Zhejiang Province, had kept an eye out for the cookies since, but never found them until she checked online with the shopping app Xiaohongshu.

They were worth the wait.

"The cookies are a bit expensive, but the price is still acceptable, considering how wonderful they taste," she told the Global Times on February 9.

At the traditional family dinner on Lunar New Year's Eve, she served the cookies for dessert.

"My nephew liked them so much that my sister asked me where she could buy them," Pan said.

Considering the pride that Chinese take in their own cuisine, they can sometimes be dismissive of foreign food, so it's a bit unusual for a woman from a third-tier city to set her Lunar New Year's table with an overseas product, even if it's just dessert.

Still, it has become more common to see foreign food such as fruit, seafood and steak on a Chinese table.

At the very least, China has been importing a lot more food from abroad in recent years. From 2010 to 2014, the last year data were available, the value of China's food imports jumped 76.7 percent to $105.26 billion, according to World Trade Organization data.

The Spring Festival is typically the "peak time" for imported food sales, said Chen Juanjuan, public relations representative for the e-commerce website yhd.com.

"The sales volume in this period usually accounts for about 30 to 35 percent of sales for the entire year," she told the Global Times on February 5.

Selling the New Year

With Chinese people buying more foreign food, domestic retailers, especially the more trendy online platforms, pushed out promotions before this year's Spring Festival holidays to spur sales of foreign products.

Tmall Global, Alibaba Group Holding's e-commerce platform that specializes in selling foreign goods on the Chinese mainland, held a sale from January 17 to January 21 for "New Year goods," including foreign foods, to get mainland buyers to purchase overseas products to prepare for the holidays.

Tmall Global's imported food revenues rose six-fold from the previous holidays period.

"The most popular imported food products are nuts, cranberries, chocolate, red ginseng, milk, powdered milk and juice," said Pan Damo, a public relations representative for Tmall Global.

Recent data on Chinese food imports are hard to come by, but fruit and nut imports jumped 16.8 percent year-on-year to $5.9 billion in 2015, according to China Customs. In January 2016, fruit and nut imports rose another 1.8 percent from the previous year.

Sales of overseas food gift boxes also jumped in the run-up to 2016 Spring Festival.

Fresh food also won many Chinese buyers. During Tmall Global's New Year's sale, fresh food sales were seven times higher than the corresponding period in 2015.

"Hot sellers included lobsters from Canada, seafood from New Zealand, mangos from Vietnam and cherries from the US," Pan Damo noted.

Still, not everyone is sold on the idea. Pan Xiao'er said she would think twice about buying fresh food, especially meat, from overseas. "Freshness is my biggest concern," she said.

Holiday demand

As China has been importing more food from abroad, it's no surprise that overseas food exporters have be selling more to China.

Australia shipped 500 tons of cherries to the Chinese mainland in 2015, said Simon Boughey, CEO of Cherry Growers Australia (CGA), an organization for Australian cherry growers.

More than 300 tons of cherries came from Australia's island state of Tasmania. The amount was more than double from the previous year.

Boughey said that the demand was especially high around Christmas and in the lead-up to the Chinese New Year.

 "Our cherry growers are trying to adapt to changes in Chinese New Year dates that vary from year to year. So they need to pick at the right time to get there for the whole holiday, not only in China but across Asia where they celebrate the Chinese New Year," he told the Global Times on February 8.

It turns out that getting good to China just before the Spring Festival has become more challenging.

In a February report, the Beijing-based International Herald Leader newspaper quoted a Canada-based lobster exporter who said that Canadian exporters need to arrange cargo flights to China much further in advance around the Chinese New Year.

They usually need to book space on a cargo plane to China one month ahead of time, except during the holidays, when they have to make reservations four months in advance.

Boughey noted that most Australian growers can get their products to market within 72 hours, provided that they have access. The export protocol is currently an issue. Right now, only cherries from Tasmania can be airfreighted to China.

 "We have asked for airfreight access into China for all growing regions in Australia," he said.

If growers from other regions of Australia had full market access they could supply 4,000 tons of cherries each season to China, he noted.

Rural tastes

According to a report by Tmall Global, spending on overseas food in China during the Spring Festival holidays was almost the same in big cities and rural areas.

"Residents in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou are the main purchasing force for our New Year goods, but we also have farmers from Luochuan, [a village in Yan'an city of Northwest China's Shannxi Province], who ordered New Zealand seafood on Tmall for a banquet," Pan Damo said.

"The rising demand from rural areas was beyond our expectation," he noted.

"Last year, we had clients from small cities in East China's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces who ordered imported wine that cost more than 10,000 yuan ($1,522) per bottle," she said. "This was unheard of in the past."
Newspaper headline: Spring Festival tables get international