During the 2016 Spring Festival holidays, a wide range of overseas food, from Japanese cookies and U.S. 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.
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.
