Little Freddie[1], a baby food brand founded in the UK in 2014 by parents Piers Buck and Taslim Ho, entered the Chinese market via cross border e-commerce in August 2015 and quickly became one of the top-selling baby food brands in China. Little Freddie has ranked first for Tmall double 11 sales in the puree category, and second in complementary baby food category from 2017 to 2019. How exactly did this brand "go viral"?
Strong brand appealing
According to Piers, the CEO, all of its products are certified as organic in the EU and target the Chinese market, specifically consumers that demand a premium, high quality, and imported baby food. Moreover, Piers personally visited hundreds of farmers and has been doing this for five years now. Little Freddie also cooperated with CCIC to provide a traceability service from the factory to the consumer.
Correct product positioning
The most popular complementary baby food in China is rice flour, but Little Freddie started with organic puree products. Little Freddie is positioned as a healthy “clean label" product that does not use any unnecessary or unnatural additives. Most of the available baby foods in the Chinese market are added with ingredients like sugar, essences, or colorings.
It also developed a rice flour rich with divalent iron as Chinese babies are prone to anemia. It has become the brand’s bestselling product online, with over 45 thousand sales on its Tmall flagship store [2] and over 10 thousand sales volume on its Tmall Global flagship store [3].
Marketing channel development
The two founders of Little Freddie already had expertise in Asia and Europe and had a good understanding of Chinese consumer culture. The brand was initially launched in the UK first. In the UK, the product is stocked in several retailers, including Sainsbury’s, M&S, Boots, Amazon, Ocado, Daylesford, and Eversfield.
Its china strategy initially only focused on e-commerce and online marketing. After a critical mass of consumers, recognition has reached the brand expanded its reach to bricks and mortar channels. At present, Little Freddie’s offline channel is located in first and second-tier cities, covering medium and high-end supermarkets, maternal and child stores, like Sam's club, Ole, and City Super.
Investment in content marketing
From 2015 to 2017, the brand mainly engaged in social media marketing using platforms like Weibo and Wechat, cooperating with different KOLs and celebrities in different content channels to attract more traffic.
It is also leveraging popular video platforms like Tiktok (Douyin), Kuaishou, the Little RED Book, and Taobao live streaming and third-party testing platforms like Daddy Lab since 2018.
Opportunities and challenges
According to Euromonitor, China’s complementary baby food market grew from 7.02 billion yuan to 14.89 billion yuan from 2011 to 2016, with an annual growth rate of more than 10%. In 2018, the market size was about 18.25 billion yuan. However, the Chinese complementary baby food market is still at a very early stage. The penetration rate of infant and child food supplements in China is only about 25%, far lower than 80% in the EU and The US [4].
Compared with the infant milk powder sector, the complementary baby food is less competitive. The problem for Little Freddie now is how to gain more market share and figure out how to attract more consumers despite the relatively high retail price of their products and the ever-changing demands of Chinese consumers.
***Disclaimer: All images used in this article are from the internet.
