China’s food industry is embracing a new wave of consumption upgrading represented by health as consumers are investing more energy and money in daily diet, sport fitness, and nutritional supplements.

Especially since 2020, product concepts such as 0 (low) sugar / 0 (low) fat, plant-based, meal replacement, edible beauty, and probiotics have become all the rage and spawned a host of new consumer brands, including Genki Forest, Oatly, Starfield, and Wonderlab, just name a few.

ChemLinked noticed two emerging healthy food ace players—Keep and Bohee Health. Instead of food enterprises, they are Internet companies which achieved resounding success in the healthy food sector.

Bohee Health’s Mobile ApplicationKeep’s Mobile Application

Different from many eye-popping start-up brands featuring one exact segment, such as Wang Baobao (instant cereal), Chocday (healthy chocolate), Wonderlab (meal replacement milkshakes), and ffit8 (protein bars), Keep and Bohee Health aims to provide healthy food choices across the board, spanning meal replacement to snacks, nutrition supplements, sports nutrition, instant food, etc.

Keep: one-stop solution of "eat, wear, use and exercise"

Keep is a domestic sport and fitness application. In 2017, its registered users had exceeded 100 million, making it the first sports APP with over 100 million users in China. So far, Keep has over 300 million registered users and more than 40 million monthly active users.¹

In 2019, Keep strategized to provide users with a one-stop solution of "eat, wear, use and exercise." Accordingly, Keep’s health food business kicked off that year. 

Keep’s fitness products

At present, Keep has three product lines of "light calorie staple food," "healthy snacks," and "nutrition supplements," with more than 70 SKUs. Its hot-selling item protein bar has set an astonishing sales volume of 100,000 boxes in omni-channel in a single month.²

Part of Keep’s food products

Keep shot to fame for online fitness courses, and then it gained insights into users’ need for healthy and delicious dietary supplements after strenuous workouts. For example, people need quality carbs to offset exercise expenditure and avoid muscle loss; high protein food to enhance the exercise effect; healthy snacks for the glutton moment in weight management.

After expanding the food business, Keep better meets consumers' demands for a healthy lifestyle.

Boohee Health: from weight management tool to healthy food brand

Founded in 2008, Boohee Health started as an Internet food database and weight management tool, providing nutrition inquiry and health management services relying on self-running APP and mini-programs on WeChat/Alipay. The health business has helped the platform garnered more than 120 million registered users, 2 million daily active users, and 10 million monthly active users.³

Like Keep, with considerable user base, Boohee Health initiated its health food business and developed four product lines:

• Function-oriented Boohee Heart (薄荷之心),

• Boohee Selected (薄荷上选), featuring healthy snacks,

• Boohee Flavor (薄荷有料) for healthy instant food choices,

• Boohee Forest (薄荷之森), aiming at children nutrition and snacks.

The total number of SKUs has exceeded 200. 

Boohee Health’s product portfolios

Its signature products include low-fat chicken breast sausage, which once recorded a monthly sales volume of over 100,000 units on Tmall, zero-calorie jelly, and low-fat chicken breast ball. It also innovatively launched  3-day, 7-day, and 21-day weight loss meal sets tailored for Chinese consumers’ dietary habits, and assorted snack packs for office workers.

Boohee Health’s 21-day weight loss meal sets

Boohee Health has transformed from a data tool company to a data-driven, product-oriented health consumption company. Its follow-up plan is to extend product lines to healthy food products for the elderly, women during pregnancy and postnatal period, and male. This May, the company has completed the D round of financing, with a valuation of more than 2 billion yuan.