Chocolate makers seek sweet success in China_美文

Chocolate makers seek sweet success in China

"Brands such as Dove used to be household words in China," said Si Yu, a shop owner who sold almost 2,000 boxes of handmade truffle chocolate in August for Qixi Festival, which is sometimes called Chinese Valentine's Day.

But fewer people are expressing satisfaction with sweets that they already know and have tried.

"Compared to other chocolate brands, we came to China later, but right at the time when Chinese people began to crave premium chocolate," Meier said.

Decades ago, the main sort of chocolate the Chinese would eat were wedding candies that were made with cocoa butter substitutes, shaped into little coins and tended to taste like hard candy.

It was only in the late 1980s that multinational chocolate brands began entering the Chinese market.

The US brand Mars is now the most successful among them, controlling 40 percent of the country's chocolate market with its Dove brand. Following it were the Swiss brand Nestle, with 11 percent of the market, and the Italian brand Ferrero, with 9 percent, according to Euromonitor data from last year. Behind them were Cadbury and Hershey's.

Their China-based competitors such as Golden Monkey and Le Conte are meanwhile still struggling to appeal to Chinese consumers.

More and more foreign brands are flocking into the country. And Chinese customers are now not only concerned with the taste of chocolate but also its ingredients, origin and even history.