Potential luxury health food opportunities for New Zealand health companies in the Chinese market: an explorative study

Abstract

Over the past three decades, China’s economy has grown rapidly, and it has driven a huge increase in the number of Chinese upper-middle class. Along with rapid economic growth, China’s environment has become polluted. Low-quality food products, contaminated water, bad quality air, frequent epidemics incidences such as SARS and avian flu as well as the many food scandals have caused Chinese consumers to become extremely health conscious; this has led to the rapid growth and expansion of the Chinese health and wellness market. The huge potential in the Chinese health product market is attracting health product companies from across world who intend to enter and compete for a share of it. This research aims to identify potential luxury-health food product opportunities to target the Chinese, and to determine the possibilities of using e-commerce channel to distribute the products to the consumers.