Dairy Farm strengthens own-brand product lines, plans to fade away 'SureBuy' brand

Dairy Farm’s supermarket Wellcome has strengthened its own-brand portfolio with the relaunch of the “Yu Pin King” brand and a new line of another own brand Meadows. Relaunched earlier this year, “Yu Pin King” offers a wide range of Chinese groceries with enhanced quality, number and packaging of the products. Currently, according to Wellcome, this brand offers about 150 products, including 130 groceries and more than 10 fresh produce.

“We aim to serve the community better and to provide products without compromising its quality — a commitment that is important during the pandemic,” said Fann Yuen, own brand director of Dairy Farm. The brand develops its own-brand products based on three pillars: quality, value for money, and deliciousness. To better meet the needs in the Hong Kong market, Wellcome has a team of product development based in the city, who sources ingredients from across the globe to diversify its product range.

As “Yu Pin King” mainly offers Chinese groceries, products or ingredients sourced from other parts of the world would go to another brand of the supermarket: Meadows. Launched in 2019 with over 50 categories, Meadows currently offers over 450 types of products with more than 300 of them being groceries. The others are fresh products.

Currently, Wellcome has another own-brand “SureBuy”. According to Danni Peirce, commercial director of Dairy Farm, this brand will fade away in the year and will be replaced by “Meadows Essentials”, a brand that offers similar products with an even lower price compared to Meadows.

“We guarantee that our own brands are priced on average 20% lower than national brands. An average family can save HK$5,000 a year if they switch from national brands to Meadows and 'Yu Pin King',” Peirce said.

Speaking of the launch and relaunch of the own brands, Peirce said it was the result of listening to customers' feedback as they hoped to have good quality products at a reasonable price. Meanwhile, the history of developing own-brand products in Hong Kong is different from overseas markets. Previously in Hong Kong, customers usually associated the own-brand products with low quality.

However, in this latest initiative, the company hopes to grow this segment and educate the customers that own-brand products are something that they can trust.

Due to the pandemic, Wellcome was forced to cancel food tasting events to promote its own-brand products previously. Instead, it rolled out small-size packaged items for customers to try. Looking forward, the brand will guarantee products from both Meadows and "Yu Pin King" will be priced on average 20% lower than other brands. Also, it will launch a campaign to celebrate the launch and relaunch of two brands in July.

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