Cultural tourism + Pinduoduo: The formula for making Guizhou sour soup a hit

Offline cultural and tourism popularity and online e - commerce promotion have become a formula for local cuisine to gain widespread popularity.

As the winter chill deepens, hot pot has once again become the star on the dinner table. There was a time when Sichuan - Chongqing spicy hot pot and Chaoshan beef hot pot dominated the choices of most consumers. Now, a sour soup originating from Guizhou and fermented for thousands of years is rapidly breaking into the public view.

Guizhou sour soup is no longer a hidden menu item known only to locals. It has quietly become a big business with an annual output value of 2.5 billion yuan. As of the first quarter of 2024, there were more than 8,700 restaurants with "sour soup" in their names across the country, and the store growth rate in the past year exceeded 40%.

How can a local flavor break into the hot pot market already saturated with spicy, mushroom, and tomato broths? Why has this sourness from the mountains of Guizhou, which dates back more than 1,400 years, suddenly become popular and spread across the country in the past two years?

01

The Regional "Barrier" of Sour Soup

Looking at the timeline, the Guizhou Village Super League in the summer of 2023 was a crucial turning point for sour soup to gain popularity. The grand occasion at that time was jokingly said by netizens that "100 million people in China went to Guizhou, and another 1 billion were on their way." However, the traffic brought by cultural and tourism is only on the surface. Long before tourists flocked to Guizhou, catering enterprises had been making in - depth efforts for decades to promote local flavors.

It was not easy for Guizhou sour soup to make its way out of the mountains. Yang Zhengzhou, the general manager of Yumeng Group, explained specifically: "Before 1999, Guizhou people could only eat sour soup at relatives' or friends' homes. If you took red sour soup out, the bottle would bulge in about a week. White sour soup was even harder to preserve; it would go bad in two or three days."

The uniqueness of this fermented product has long restricted it to the geographical environment. Sour soup is fermented from local specialty wild tomatoes, peppers, and litsea cubeba in Guizhou's unique temperature, humidity, and microbial environment. Just as Moutai can only be produced in Maotai Town, outside of Guizhou, the climate, water quality, and microbial flora in the air all change, making it difficult to replicate the unique flavor of sour soup, as if it were locked in Guizhou by an invisible barrier.

To solve this problem, since 1999, Yumeng Group, a time - honored brand in Guizhou, has joined hands with multiple scientific research institutions to gradually achieve standardized and large - scale production of sour soup by optimizing the fermentation process. In the group's dedicated warehouse, the key strains for Yumeng sour soup are stored, which are the key to maintaining the flavor of the sour soup. According to Yang Zhengzhou, "Even the chairman is not allowed to enter this warehouse. Only a few designated staff members are responsible for its custody."

Yang Zhengzhou recalled the enterprise's transformation process: "In fact, our enterprise paid the price in the early days and gradually led the development of the sour soup industry. Around 2018, with the rise of e - commerce, especially the popularity of Liuzhou snail rice noodles, we made a magnificent transformation and began to develop more products suitable for e - commerce. Currently, we have three major sectors: seasonings, namely Yumeng sour soup; fast - moving consumer goods, such as our Kaili sour soup noodles; and a beverage series, including bayberry juice, etc."

Scaling up local cuisine and then expanding product categories through e - commerce is also one of the typical development paths for Guizhou sour soup enterprises. Before entering the e - commerce channel, Guizhou sour soup enterprises mainly supplied B - end catering businesses, and C - end consumers outside Guizhou had a very low awareness of it.

02

From the Village Super League's Explosive Popularity to E - commerce Order Surges

It wasn't until 2023 that sour soup finally caught up with its era of opportunity.

Yang Zhengzhou analyzed: "Local events like the Village Super League, Village BA, and now Village T, these large cultural and tourism IPs have attracted many out - of - province tourists. When they come to Guizhou, they must try sour soup."

This is particularly evident in the feedback of e - commerce data. Pan Linzi, the e - commerce director of Yumeng Group, used specific figures to illustrate this change: "Before 2020, Yumeng's online sales hovered around a few million yuan every year. In recent years, there has been exponential growth. As of now this year, the sales have reached about 30 million yuan. Since the peak season for e - commerce is in the second half of the year, it is expected that the online sales this year can reach 50 million yuan."

Another obvious sign of sour soup's popularity is the change in the geographical distribution of the consumer group. Pan Linzi introduced: "In the past few years, about 70% of the consumers were from the Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Chongqing regions. After sour soup became popular in 2023, the proportion from these regions dropped to about 40%, and another 40% came from other places, such as Zhejiang and Guangdong." Zhejiang and Guangdong are gathering places for Guizhou people working away from home. Thanks to e - commerce, the delicacies that Guizhou people couldn't enjoy after leaving their hometown can now be easily replicated outside. "Many people from Guizhou will constantly recommend our Guizhou products, the taste of their hometown, and gradually drive the entire market."

Nanshanpo, an old - fashioned factory also specializing in sour soup products, has also benefited from the popularity of local cultural and tourism. Weng Lin, the e - commerce director of Nanshanpo, pointed out: "Guizhou has made great efforts in cultural and tourism in the past two years, and the Village Super League is one of the major IPs. So we launched a product with a co - branded packaging for the Village Super League. In addition, Nanshanpo sent two football teams to participate in the Village Super League, also combining with local cultural and tourism activities in this way to gain more brand exposure."

Before this year, Nanshanpo's main business was also supplying B - end catering businesses. They further improved the traditional fermentation process by using digital brewing technology, solving problems such as the long fermentation cycle and low production efficiency of traditional sour soup. With the popularity of Guizhou flavors, they also opened up the C - end online channel this year. Weng Lin said: "We just launched on the Pinduoduo platform in September this year, and the monthly sales reached 600,000 yuan. In the future, my focus will be on e - commerce platforms like Pinduoduo, and I aim to create the first single link with over 100,000 sales."

Offline cultural and tourism popularity and online e - commerce promotion have become a formula for local cuisine to gain widespread popularity. This also applies to other Guizhou specialty foods. Take Dingjia Crispy Pork as an example. Xu Jiejie, its e - commerce operation director, introduced: "Crispy pork is a local delicacy in Guizhou. Cut the pork into cubes and cook it like rendering lard, then season it with glutinous rice wine, white sugar, and vinegar. In Guiyang, we add a little crispy pork to intestine and blood noodles, Huaxi beef noodles, mutton noodles, etc. Our product promotion also follows the rhythm of Guiyang's cultural and tourism. July, August, and September are the summer tourism seasons every year, and we will heavily invest in advertising during these months."

Currently, the annual sales of Dingjia Crispy Pork's entire factory are more than 30 million yuan, and the proportion of online sales is gradually increasing. Last year, the sales on the Pinduoduo platform alone reached 4 million yuan. Ding Guiyue, the chairman of Dingjia Crispy Pork, deeply felt: "Many consumers come to our physical store on Minsheng Road through online channels. They learned about our Guizhou brand and want to have a taste. So e - commerce has a great and positive impact on us."

03

How E - commerce Platforms Promote the Nationalization of Local Flavors

E - commerce not only brings sales opportunities but also promotes the comprehensive upgrade of products and supply chains.

The new demands of online consumers have prompted these time - honored enterprises to innovate product categories and adjust product structures. For example, Yumeng Sour Soup launched small - sized packages and sour soup bases that can be cooked directly by adding water without stir - frying. Dingjia Crispy Pork not only launched smaller - sized versions but also introduced lean crispy pork for the external market and gift - boxed products suitable for souvenirs. Nanshanpo launched a fruit and vegetable - flavored sour soup with lower spiciness in addition to the sour and spicy Guizhou flavor to meet the needs of consumers in East and South China who can't tolerate much spice. "Moreover, products like spicy chicken noodles, Sichuan pepper chicken cubes, spicy chicken rice noodles, and fermented bean curd crispy pork have all improved the product structure by combining regional characteristics with popular noodle and rice products," added Weng Lin, the e - commerce director of Nanshanpo.

During the emergence of these "new supplies," the empowerment of e - commerce platforms is particularly crucial. Weng Lin especially emphasized the support of the platform for intangible cultural heritage brands: "E - commerce platforms like Pinduoduo are very friendly. They give more weight to our intangible cultural heritage brands, especially our double intangible cultural heritage brands, compared to ordinary ones."

Xu Jie added from the perspective of traffic: "The biggest help Pinduoduo gives us is the traffic in its field, which makes the radiation of the crispy pork category on the entire e - commerce platform relatively large." Pan Linzi mentioned the operational advantages of the platform: "I think Pinduoduo is very friendly to new merchants in all aspects. Its entry threshold is relatively low. For example, for full - site promotion, we don't need to set keywords, which simplifies our operational difficulties."

Through strategies such as single - product traffic attraction, full - site advertising, and brand support, e - commerce platforms represented by Pinduoduo have paved a high - speed road for Guizhou flavors from the mountains to the dining table.

The success of Guizhou sour soup also provides a replicable model for the industrialization of local specialty foods across the country. Its development path is clear: first, gain popularity through cultural and tourism hotspots to form consumer awareness; then, undertake traffic through e - commerce platforms to expand sales channels; on this basis, optimize product supply with the platform's empowerment; and finally, promote the formation and upgrading of industrial clusters.

When traditional flavors are deeply integrated with modern commercial infrastructure and local specialties reach consumers across the country through digital channels, what we see is not only the success of Guizhou sour soup but also the formation of a new industrial ecosystem. Those specialty foods once confined to a specific region may also welcome the era of going national and even global.