After visiting Yuanqi Forest's factory in person, I realized that everyone still doesn't understand Tang Binsen well enough.

Ask AI · How does Tang Binsheng’s strategic shift affect the competitive landscape in China’s new consumer sector?

Competition in new consumer brands has shifted from superficial marketing battles to deeper R&D battles and supply chain battles.

New JING Original · Author | Lu Yao

In late March in Ezhou Nanxning, with the spring chill not yet fully gone, at a national-level high-tech zone on the outskirts of the city, Nongfu Spring held an event that was defined as a “recording session.”

In fact, before this, my impression of Nongfu Spring still stayed at “a viral brand that broke through thanks to sugar-free sparkling water,” and even carried some bias. The so-called “Creation Camp 2044” was nothing more than changing the name and holding a press conference, getting a group of product managers to tell stories, and letting the outside world get a taste of what’s coming.

But when I walked around and watched everything, all my earlier ideas were overturned.

On stage were product managers with an average age of under 30, with extremely simple backdrop materials. When some of them went on stage, they would still get nervous; the hand holding the microphone would tighten slightly. Then, they would start by smiling: “We’ve prepared for quite a while, but I’m still a bit anxious.”

This time, they didn’t put the focus on market expectations for new products. Instead, they recorded the complete process of more than a dozen drinks—everything from the initial creative idea to the product prototype. For example, a small thing they encountered in their daily lives, and then how they thought about using a bottle of beverage to solve that small thing.

After watching the entire nearly 4-hour product presentation, my biggest takeaway is that the narrative logic in the new consumer industry has indeed undergone some deeper shifts.

In the past few years, whenever people talked about new consumer brands, the impression was mostly stuck on labels like “viral hit products” and “internet-famous brands.” A brand’s rise often went hand in hand with a precise burst of traffic buys, a marketing concept that struck a pain point, and a fast-scaling blockbuster single product. But after the tide ebbed, most ended up in the dilemma of “having blockbuster hits but no long-lasting success,” and even disappeared from market competition.

This time, though, I saw a completely different logic: shifting from gambling on a single blockbuster hit to having the confidence for systematic innovation; shifting from using marketing to define demand to using R&D to reproduce demand; shifting from chasing short-term scale growth to building a long-term industrial foundation.

It is these changes that have made every bottle of Nongfu Spring’s lightly sweet drink feel more three-dimensional.

01

The logic of new consumer brands has changed

The new consumer boom from 2019 to 2022 was a supply-side frenzy driven by traffic dividends. At that time, online traffic costs were still relatively low. Social media’s seeding logic could quickly penetrate users’ minds, and a mature ODM contract manufacturing system could help a brand go from idea to product in a matter of months.

A standardized playbook—“find a contract manufacturer to make the product, buy traffic to seed and generate buzz, expand distribution channels to drive sales”—gave rise to a large number of internet-famous brands. Nongfu Spring’s early bubble water blockbuster, seemingly, also fit this logic.

But the fatal flaw of this logic was also clear: products without core barriers are easily pulled into homogeneous competition. Rapid increases in traffic costs keep eating into brand profits. The lifecycle of a single blockbuster is limited. Once users’ tastes get tired, the brand’s growth immediately slows down.

According to data from the China Beverage Industry Association, the new-product iteration cycle in China’s soft drink market in 2025 has already shrunk from 18 months in 2020 to 9 months, but the survival rate of new products after 12 months is still below 10%. The lifecycle of most new consumer brands is even shorter than the trend cycle of a popular blockbuster product.

Nongfu Spring has also gone through this kind of predicament. After it opened the market early with sugar-free sparkling water, it rapidly launched multiple new product categories. However, not all products gained market recognition, and some new releases were taken off shelves due to sales coming in below expectations.

It was from that time onward that Nongfu Spring began shifting from “driven by blockbuster hits” to “driven by a system.” Creation Camp 2044 is precisely a concentrated showcase of this new system.

The core of this event is to demonstrate a complete new-product incubation mechanism. Nongfu Spring provides these young product managers with comprehensive R&D resources, supply chain support, and clearly defined room that “allows mistakes.”

This mechanism has the characteristics of high experimentation cost tolerance and low market risk. On the R&D side, they invest enough resources so product managers can fully try different formulas, processes, and flavors, solving potential problems in labs and pilot production lines. On the market side, they use user co-creation—using real user feedback as the basis for product improvement—to avoid large-scale market risks after product launch.

Worth mentioning is that, according to official information, as a core segment of the newly established Huazhong Healthy Beverage R&D Center, the newly founded Ezhou Innovation Institute is the first public service experimental base in China to realize the full path from R&D to small-scale trials and pilot production—from creative ideas to product prototype transformation. It is equipped with more than 200 professional R&D devices and has the most comprehensive domestic pilot production lines for healthy beverages with switchable categories.

Simply put, in the past, a drink’s creative concept had to go through lab R&D, finding a contract manufacturer for small-scale trials, coordinating resources for pilot production, and adjusting processes before reaching mass production. The whole process often took more than half a year, and standardized production lines at contract manufacturers were often hard to meet individualized process needs.

Now, product managers can complete the entire workflow within the same park—from formula fine-tuning, to sample runs from small-scale trials, to pilot production—compressing the cycle from the creative idea to the product prototype to within 1 month.

At the event site, Tang Binsheng said that the establishment of the Ezhou Innovation Institute gives Nongfu Spring more confidence to make better products. The essence of this confidence is that the initiative for product innovation has been taken back from contract manufacturers into Nongfu Spring’s own hands.

Looking across the whole industry, this kind of shift has already become a consensus.

According to data from the China Beverage Industry Association, in 2025 the total R&D spending in China’s soft drink industry reached 10 billion yuan, up 10% year over year, and industry R&D investment continues to strengthen. At its 2026 dealer conference, Nongfu Spring made “expanding into new products” its core strategy. Over the past three years, Coca-Cola has “reset” its business in the China market and continued to increase investment in localized R&D targeting China. Pepsi also launched a brand-new energy drink brand, “Huaneng,” in 2026 to address its shortfalls in the functional beverage segment in the China market.

When industry giants all start treating R&D as a core competitive strength, the early-mover advantage that new consumer brands previously built on marketing and traffic is being rapidly caught up to. This also means that competition in the new consumer sector has moved from a superficial marketing war into a deeper R&D war and supply chain war.

02

The deep waters of R&D are not “black tech”

In the laboratory of the Ezhou Innovation Institute, I didn’t see too many “earth-shattering black technologies” that the outside world might imagine. Instead, I saw ongoing refinement of basic beverage processing techniques.

Nongfu Spring Research Institute’s four major R&D directions announced to the public for the first time are: stable application of non-artificial colors, -196℃ liquid nitrogen freshness lock, slow fermentation of fresh hawthorn, and dynamic adjustment of bubble release. These technologies may not sound flashy, but they are all details that ultimately determine the taste, flavor, and quality of a bottle of beverage.

This kind of refinement of basic processes runs through all the products of Creation Camp 2044. The most representative case is the iterative upgrade of Nongfu Spring’s bubble water “burst juice” white peach product.

In their sharing, product managers said the upgrade didn’t involve any complicated black technology—just one very small thing: “put the peach back where it belongs.” To reproduce the flavor of fresh peaches with dew at 4 a.m., the team refined flavor details over a hundred times—from color, aroma, to the acidity-sweetness balance in the taste. In the end, they didn’t make the peach taste more like a drink; they made the drink taste more like a peach.

This way of thinking is completely the opposite of conventional practices in the beverage industry. For a long time, when developing flavors, the beverage industry mostly used flavorings and additives to simulate fruit tastes. They focused on the strong impact of the first bite, but it was difficult to truly reproduce the fruit’s own freshness and vitality.

Now, as consumers demand health and authenticity more and more, using technology to reproduce the original flavor of ingredients has become a common trend in the industry.

Most of the more than a dozen products on site followed this logic. There was nothing that overturned the industry with a new concept. Everything came from needs that grew out of everyday life.

So自在’s honeysuckle and pear water draws inspiration from a product manager’s childhood memories. Back then, when someone would “get heat” (become overheated), their mother would brew a bowl of pear water in the kitchen, toss in a few honeysuckle blossoms, and the whole house would smell warm and sweet. Now everyone stays up late to work overtime and eats takeout. They “get heat” at the drop of a hat, but they rarely have time to boil a bowl of pear soup. So they thought: why not bottle the pear soup from home?

There’s also an “extra-strength VC, 0 sugar” version of the water from “aliens,” inspired by the product manager’s observations of friends around them. Young people today talk a lot about “punk wellness,” buying piles of supplements and vitamin tablets—then once they buy them, it’s basically like eating. So they wondered: can adding VC be done without needing to deliberately “stick with it”?

A similar obsession with “reproducing the original taste” can also be felt in a drink called Dan Zhen brown rice milk. The direction is equally simple: breakfast. They blend the nutritional feel of brown rice with a light toasted aroma using an enzyme hydrolysis process for rice slurry. It’s low sugar and low fat, and tastes good both hot and cold. On rushed mornings—when you’re trying to make the early “eight o’clock commute,” rushing to the subway, and don’t have time to cook—a cup of it makes breakfast taste great, and it doesn’t have to be that hard.

These products aren’t complicated. You could even say they’re quite plain. Compared with trying to create a demand that users have never had before, they seem to care more about those small moments and minor annoyances in everyday life that are often overlooked—then catch them gently with a bottle of beverage.

The “2025 China Beverage Cold Drink Industry Trend Report” shows that among newly launched beverage products in China in 2025, the share of low-sugar/zero-sugar products has already reached 78%. When consumers buy drinks, the proportion of checking the ingredient list is increasingly high. Demand for real ingredients and natural components is growing stronger. This change in demand pushes companies to shift R&D focus from “using additives to mimic flavors” to “using technology to reproduce real flavors.”

Of course, we also need to see that these products face challenges.

In China’s soft drink market, leading players like Nongfu Spring, Coca-Cola, and 康师傅 have nationwide end-channel coverage and strong supply chain capabilities. No matter how strong a new product is, it still has to face direct competition from these giants.

For example, in the electrolyte water segment, Nongfu Spring’s Alien early brand ignition has already been completed, and in 2025 it still maintained high growth year over year. But in early 2026, Nongfu Spring directly rolled out electrolyte drinks with the main brand endorsement. With the channel advantage of over 2 million end outlets nationwide, it quickly completed offline shelf stocking and delivered a strong shock to the market.

This kind of competition precisely shows that new consumer has entered the deep waters.

In the past, new consumer brands could quickly gain scale by relying on a blockbuster to ramp up sales in a niche segment before the giants had reacted. But now, the giants have fully entered the game, and competition in niche segments has become competition across the entire industrial chain. Product strength is just the foundation. You need no less than R&D capability, supply chain capability, channel capability, and brand capability.

03

The endgame for new consumer brands

is returning to the essence of business

The theme of Creation Camp 2044 is “an agreement for 20 years from now.”

It sounds pretty far away, even a bit empty. The business environment today is too urgent. Founders want quarterly growth, investors want annual returns, and listed companies need standout data in each earnings cycle. Very few people think about what they should do for themselves 20 years later.

But it seems Nongfu Spring isn’t just calling out a slogan about “what we will do 20 years from now.” They are truly laying groundwork for 20 years from now: spending 500 million yuan to build a dedicated R&D base, setting up a complete system from technology to products; giving a group of young people under 30 the opportunity to test and fail; and being willing to grind those details that others can’t see just to make a bottle of drink well.

At the event site, Tang Binsheng said that many great things in the world don’t start out as great as outsiders imagine. At the beginning, it might just be a few simple and rough ideas. Creation Camp 2044 isn’t a press conference—it’s a recording session. The goal is to record the very first simple and pure things, record the original intention, and record simplicity.

Even more interesting is that within this system, there really is room to “allow mistakes.” Tang Binsheng said on site that Creation Camp is a stage for young people to showcase creativity. As long as you dare to try, the company will provide you with resources and allows you to make mistakes.

That sentence sounds simple, but in today’s business environment, there are far too few companies that can do it. Too many companies talk about wanting to innovate and encouraging young people—but as soon as a project fails, they go after responsibility, and someone ends up taking the blame. In the end, everyone only dares to do the safest things that won’t go wrong, and innovation naturally becomes empty talk.

The resources and room to experiment he gave to young people allow them to try with confidence. Even if only one out of ten products succeeds, it’s still a win. More importantly, in the process they can build up a capability to continuously make great products—not based on luck from just one time.

In the past few years, the new consumer industry has risen and fallen. We’ve seen too many internet-famous brands. They quickly became nationwide sensations by relying on a blockbuster hit and a wave of traffic buys, and then they disappear just as quickly. Only after the tide recedes do you find out who’s been swimming naked.

Now that the whole industry is changing, at a time like this, those who settle down and focus on making products will go further.

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