Fonterra China Foodservices has partnered with the country’s biggest restaurant rating website, Dianping.com – a site with more than 180 million active users – to find the best cakes in China using Anchor Cream.
Esther Chu, Vice President of Fonterra China Foodservices, said the campaign has made an immediate splash among Fonterra’s bakery customers and consumers in China.
“More than 5,200 outlets from 158 bakery customers in 241 cities across China have jumped on board and, in just three weeks, more than seven million votes have been cast by Chinese cake lovers,” she says.
“Before the campaign started, only 54% of the 405 participating recipes were topped with Anchor cream so to qualify all of them have converted, which will have a direct impact on our sales.”
With Christmas, New Year and Chinese New Year, along with a number of major festivals, all falling within the space of a few short months, winter is the peak season for cake consumption in China.
“The competition is perfectly timed to maximise brand and product exposure and drive cake sales, and the response from our customers and their consumers is testament to that,” says Chu.
Every drop of Anchor Cream used in the competition is sourced from the Co-operative’s new state-of-the-art UHT facility at Waitoa, in the Waikato, meaning it is the freshest whipping cream in the market, says Operations Manager Russell Muir.
“China is a real growth market for UHT cream, so we’re pulling out all the stops to ensure when our customers order Anchor they’re getting the freshest cream. We’ve put a programme in place to get our cream to market faster and have managed to cut that lead time down to around 33 days from Waitoa to China.”
Fonterra’s premium Anchor brand is already a leading player in China’s dairy cream segment. But the business has an ambitious goal to increase Anchor cream sales at a 42 per cent compound annual growth rate from F15 to F18. To achieve that, it will continue to work hard on converting bakery customers from using non-dairy to Anchor dairy ingredients.
“The market share of dairy cream in China’s booming bakery sector is still small compared to more matured markets. But with bakeries gaining popularity and Chinese consumers’ increasing awareness towards health, there has been steadily increasing demand for dairy nutrition here in China. This creates huge opportunities for our Anchor professional dairy ingredients business here,” Chu noted.
The campaign winner will be announced in January 2016.