Drugstores’ milk powder sales start slow

The trial sale of milk powder in five drugstores in Beijing that began over the weekend did not attract many customers.

Experts said that increasing the amount of places that milk powder is sold will not help rebuild public trust in milk powder brands which is low due to quality scandals in recent years.

The trial started Saturday and the sales data has not been collected, Qi Na of the International Brand Management Center of the China Association of International Trade under the Ministry of Commerce, which initiated the sales project, told the Global Times Monday.

"We have no sales data to provide to media now, but the test sale in the first two days did not attract many customers," Zhang Dawei, a Beijing-based manager of Yongantang, a chain which is one of the five pilot drugstores, told the Global Times Monday.

The milk powder is sold in vending machines produced by Beijing-based UBox, Zhang said.

The test sale offered a 10 percent discount on milk powder from 11 brands, including seven Chinese brands and four foreign, said Qi.

Chinese customers are mainly concerned about food safety and price, Chen Lianfang, an analyst from Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant Ltd, told the Global Times Monday, saying that if selling milk powder in drugstores cannot solve these two concerns, it would be meaningless.

"I will not buy milk powder from drugstores because it makes no difference if the quality is the same as what supermarkets sell," Tian Ye, a mother of a two-year-old girl, told the Global Times.

Qi said the center expects to include about 200 drugstores in Beijing in the program and then expand to other provinces.