On September 19th, JD.com held a press conference in Beijing to announce its upgraded pet strategy. At the conference, JD.com Pet officially launched its newly upgraded BEST strategy, leveraging its long-established core advantages in supply chain, omnichannel, open ecosystem, and service quality control. The strategy will focus on four key business areas: "leading growth, ecosystem win-win, quality service, and trend upgrading." It will further extend the JD Supermarket BOOST strategy and advance the strategic upgrade of "expanding user growth, developing local business, building an open ecosystem, constructing a supply chain platform, and expanding into lower-tier markets," working with partners to lead high growth in the industry.
In recent years, the "pet craze" has emerged, and pet companionship has become a basic necessity. The physical pet market has reached a scale of 115.8 billion yuan, with pet food accounting for 46% and staple pet food accounting for as much as 34%. However, at the same time, the pet product market is rife with problems such as substandard products, inferior raw materials, spoiled products, and foreign matter, which not only seriously harm consumers' rights but also hinder the industry's progress.
Against this backdrop, Liu Lu, General Manager of the Pet Business Department of JD Retail Group's Supermarket Omnichannel Business Group, stated at the meeting that JD Pet will continue to play a pivotal role in the industry, working with the government, authoritative institutions, brands, and manufacturers to jointly build a pet food safety assurance system, continuously leading the industry in full-chain control of pet food safety, creating a virtuous cycle for upgrading pet food quality, building new growth points for JD, and at the same time helping the industry and brands achieve certain growth in an uncertain market environment.
Liu Lu, General Manager of the Pet Business Department of JD Retail Group's Supermarket Omnichannel Business Group, released the BEST strategy.
Pet consumption needs are difficult to meet, and JD.com's focus on pet trends is helping brands achieve high growth.
Rapid growth in any industry is often accompanied by market changes. Amidst these changes, a major challenge for the pet industry is the difficulty in aligning growth trajectory with meeting evolving consumer demands. On one hand, pet consumption patterns are diversifying, generating numerous new demands. Accurately identifying and meeting these demands has become a critical challenge for all brands. On the other hand, in a market rife with counterfeit and substandard products, the contradiction between consumers' increasing focus on product quality and the difficulty in fulfilling their needs continues to unfold.
Faced with new market changes, major brands need to continuously strengthen the hard power of their products, and also urgently need support from multiple dimensions such as supply chain, omni-channel layout and marketing operations to more accurately meet consumers' demand for quality products. This is in line with the strategic goals and core capabilities of JD Pet BEST.
From the perspective of JD Pet's BEST strategy, its goal is to help brands grow. Relying on its many advantages built up over the years, such as supply chain, omni-channel layout, open ecosystem, and service quality control, it focuses on four major business directions: "leading growth, win-win ecosystem, quality service, and trend upgrading". It helps brands seize faster growth opportunities, while meeting more accurate user needs with high-quality products and services, and achieving a win-win situation for consumers, brands, and the platform.
Specifically, in terms of trend upgrading, JD Pet focuses on three main aspects: creating trendy single products, supporting trendy brands, and expanding trendy channels, striving to achieve the strategic goal of "10 billion yuan".
In terms of creating trending single products, JD Pet will leverage its leading trend insights and reverse customization capabilities to accurately uncover user needs. Through digital empowerment and full-chain support, it will safeguard the growth of trending new products and create hundreds of trending new products with sales exceeding 10 million. In terms of building trending brands, JD Pet will launch full life-cycle support, comprehensively empowering people, products, and places from the brand's inception to its success, creating trending categories at 10x speed. In terms of expanding trending channels, JD Pet will rely on its multi-faceted layout of offline warehousing, logistics, and stores to help brands reduce costs, accumulate offline user assets, and create new channel growth worth billions.
In terms of upgrading quality services, JD Pet has previously launched a number of initiatives such as the 5S Pet Care Plan, Quality Ranking, and Quality Recommendation. In the future, JD Pet will continue to focus on upgrading quality services, deeply addressing the pain points that users care about, such as "quality control, price control, medical consultation control, food selection control, and food switching control," to provide consumers with a shopping choice that guarantees quality and leads in service.
Currently, JD Pet has become the industry's recognized largest sales growth platform for brands and a primary hub for creating trending products. On JD Pet, over 200 brands have achieved growth exceeding 100%, and over 100 brands have seen year-on-year growth exceeding 50%. Eight sub-categories, including baked goods, freeze-dried food, and smart litter boxes, have also become leading trending categories in the industry. In the future, guided by its BEST strategy, JD Pet will bring even broader growth potential to the industry.
Frequent irregularities in pet food safety; JD.com collaborates with pet-related platforms to establish standards and jointly safeguard food safety.
For the pet industry, pet food safety has become a lifeline for its development. One of the main factors restricting pet food safety is the lack of comprehensive and stringent industry standards. As Qian Yurong, Deputy Secretary-General of the Pet Health Industry Analysis Technology Professional Committee of the Guangdong Provincial Association for Analysis and Testing (hereinafter referred to as the "Pet Health Committee"), stated, the "baked pet food" market is rife with substandard products, and there are no standards to follow for producing complete cat and dog food using existing baking processes, which seriously harms consumer rights.
To guide the standardized development of the industry, achieve full-chain control over pet food safety, and create a win-win ecosystem that links the upstream and downstream of the industry chain, JD Pet, together with the Pet Health Committee, as well as baking food brands and pet food factories such as PetHee, Afei & Buddy, and Liaoning Haichen Organic Pet Food, jointly launched the "Group Standard for Baked Complete Cat and Dog Food" project at the press conference.
Through the standardization of this system, the pet industry will develop a series of systematic regulations and professional industry standards, covering everything from relevant terminology and definitions to processes, raw materials and additives, nutritional requirements, experimental methods, testing rules, and packaging. This will not only fill the regulatory gap in baking processes but also establish a comprehensive control over the entire supply chain of baked complete cat and dog food, encompassing seven dimensions including standards and user feedback. This will foster a healthy and standardized ecosystem, further solidify the pet food safety guarantee system, and contribute to the high-quality development of the industry.
Pet food quality is difficult to control and trace. JD.com Pet Alliance aims to create a quality ecosystem for pet food.
In the pet industry, besides the thorny issue of pet food safety, another major pain point is the difficulty in controlling the production quality of pet food. Product quality varies widely, and traceability along the supply chain is challenging. This not only makes it harder for consumers to purchase safe products but also hinders the industry from achieving a quality ecosystem where "good money drives out bad," thus becoming a crucial hurdle for the industry's further development. To address this industry pain point, the entire supply chain, from source to the pet food bowl, needs to be controllable and traceable. Therefore, building a "responsible and compassionate" pet supply chain is imperative.
As a new type of physical enterprise, one of JD.com's core advantages is its long-cultivated "responsible supply chain," which has consistently maintained excellent product and service quality control, creating a high-quality consumer experience and becoming the preferred channel for users' shopping. Now, JD Pet is applying its core supply chain advantages to the control of pet food.
At the press conference, JD Pet, together with the Feed Efficacy and Safety Supervision and Testing Center of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and Xinhua Credit of China Economic Information Service, jointly launched the Pet Food Raw Material Integrity Alliance to achieve quality control from the source and promote quality upgrades.
For the pet industry, JD Pet's move is of great significance. On the one hand, controlling pet food will meet consumers' new demands for high-quality products. On the other hand, JD Pet will work with raw material suppliers, brand owners, manufacturers, testing and evaluation institutions, and associations to build a traceability system for pet food. Simultaneously, it will continuously strengthen its research and testing capabilities for the safety of pet raw materials, and establish a credit system and rating guarantee. This will create an open and win-win industry ecosystem, providing consumers with a green and traceable raw material supply chain. This will not only help the pet industry create more competitive products but also drive the entire industry towards quality development.
For this reason, the Pet Food Ingredient Integrity Alliance received enthusiastic participation from over a hundred authoritative industry organizations, brands, and manufacturers, including the Feed Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the Pet Industry Branch of the China Animal Husbandry Association, the Pet Industry Committee, and New Hope Liuhe.
In addition, JD.com's September Super Category Day for Pets will also feature over 100 trendy new pet products from numerous well-known and emerging brands, including Myfoodie, Royal Canin, Weish, NetEase Yanxuan, Bona Pet, Sheba, Zuichong, and Solid Gold. Search "stock up on cat and dog food" on the JD.com app to enter the Super Category Day. During the peak period on September 22, there will be coupons for 100 RMB off purchases over 299 RMB, and PLUS members can enjoy a 25% discount on purchases over 199 RMB.
Currently, "quality" has become a key factor influencing consumers' choice of shopping channels. As a result, JD Supermarket, which leads the industry in growth rate of pet products, has the most guaranteed quality, and provides the best service across the industry, has long been the preferred channel for pet consumers to purchase pet products and services. It has become an omnichannel supermarket that helps pet brands achieve high growth, profitability, and certainty.
Following this strategic upgrade, JD Pet will continue to refine its "responsible supply chain," leveraging its comprehensive advantages in omnichannel, open ecosystem, and service quality control to drive pet brands to achieve high-speed, high-quality, and high-efficiency growth, becoming the industry's largest stabilizer, the largest growth engine for brands, and the largest incubator for trends.
