Where Do a Convenience Store's Weekly New Arrivals Come From? We Sat In on a FamilyMart Tasting Session

A model the convenience store industry has widely adopted — and it decides which products end up in front of you

In a convenience store, where every square foot is worth its weight in gold, shelf space is the fiercest battlefield.

"Only the most popular, best-selling products make it into a convenience store," Wang Yiwen, FamilyMart China's spokesperson, told QDaily. A FamilyMart store of about 100 square meters has some 2,000 to 3,000 products to draw on, and more than 50% of the range is swapped out every year — a figure that reaches 70% in Japan and around 60% in Taiwan.

So we went and saw for ourselves the last checkpoint a product has to clear before it reaches a convenience store shelf: the new-product tasting and testing session. It is probably not what you imagine.

For one thing, you don't get to smack your lips and pass judgment as you go. The opposite: you're better off not saying a word, just eating and drinking your way diligently through everything with your head down, watching closely. They even hand you a bottle of mineral water so you can rinse between dishes and keep one item's flavor from bleeding into the next.

The whole thing runs to a strict rhythm; a session usually lasts about an hour and a half. A well-trained taster gets through every product fast, scores each one, and raises questions about the price or the design.

That is not as easy as it sounds. The first time I walked into the room and was told I had to finish the "full set" in front of me by myself, it felt like the biggest challenge of my career so far.

I was told afterwards that this was only part of the lineup — some hot items, oden among them, hadn't been brought out yet. A session normally runs through more than 30 products.

Here is the list of what I tasted:

FamilyMart new-product tasting lineup

Fresh food

1. Korean-style cheese roast chicken rice box
2. Crispy fried fish fillet rice box
3. Wasabi seafood konjac noodles
4. Grilled salmon triangle rice ball
5. Honey bonito triangle rice ball

Chilled food

1. Yellow peach and coconut milk cake
2. Five-spice edamame
3. Shepherd's purse and wood ear wontons

Chilled drinks

1. Beinasong connoisseur-grade coffee drinks (Manba latte, hazelnut latte, matcha latte)
2. Wei Chuan Daily Body Management (red dragon fruit, mixed berry, orange and acerola cherry)
3. Feisu 100% juice series (pineapple apple, mango orange, strawberry beet, apple lemon wheatgrass)
4. New Hope Chuxin flavored fermented milk
5. Xueka mousse cappuccino coffee drink
6. Revive energy drink

Crackers and chips

1. Minzucun tile crackers
2. Oishi Maichun puffed snacks (classic, seaweed)
3. Daoji Philippine banana chips

Chocolate and candy

1. Dove cookie white chocolate (matcha + lemon)
2. Kuzi sugar-free mints (peach, lemon)
3. Pressed candy tablets (Big Yellow Chicken, Big Black Chicken)
4. RIO boxed candy

Bread

1. Butter mini-ball bread
2. Scallion potato bread
3. Soft-bake bun
4. Multi-cheese bread

Ya Mi Jiang series

1. Beef jerky (spicy)

Household goods

1. Rexona cooling body spray
2. Weilaishu body paint stick
3. Zeiss professional optical lens wipes
4. Zhenni Huafang UV mini five-fold umbrella
5. Disney Zootopia mirror and eye mask set

First, who gets to attend?

In the first and third week of every month, FamilyMart holds a new-product session at its Shanghai headquarters — a large-scale tasting every two weeks.

It usually runs from 9:30 to 11:00 in the morning. (You do worry a little about FamilyMart staff having to eat that much before their appetites have woken up…) After a "full set" like that, of course, there's no need for lunch.

Half the people there are "professionals": roughly 20-plus staff from the merchandising department, who develop the products. Sales, food safety and marketing are the other three main departments in the room. Then there are occasional attendees — PR, HR and the like — who score the products the way an ordinary shopper would.

That adds up to 50 or 60 people per session, held in the largest conference room in the FamilyMart building.

Picture 50 or 60 people eating in silence with their heads down while, at the front, the product manager responsible clicks through slides, walks everyone onto the next item, and explains as they chew what is new about it, what price is proposed, and what it competes with on the market.

There's something quite ceremonial about it. Because the session involves a lot of internal information, all we photographed was the empty room.

Have a look 👇

How does the tasting work?

First come the products that have to be prepared on the spot: steamed buns, oden, boxed meals that need heating. At 8:15 on the day, staff arrive to set up the room, heat the fresh food, and get every dish ready.

Nobody has to eat a whole boxed meal. One "full-size" box is there to be looked at: is the plating attractive, do the meat slices hold their shape, does the food slide around inside the box…

A second, smaller sample box is the one you actually taste 👇

After each product you fill in a score on the evaluation sheet (more on the scoring below) and move on to the next. The categories run roughly in this order: fresh food, drinks, crackers and candy, bread, household goods.

As we said, the session is the last checkpoint before a product enters a store. Several rounds of testing and review come first.

Buyers in the merchandising department spend their days hunting for new products. Once a buyer finds a candidate, it goes up to the section chief, then to the deputy department head, and only after it clears the department head does it reach the new-product proposal meeting.

How are products scored?

Convenience store products fall broadly into two groups: private brand (PB) and normal brand (NB). PB is the key to a store's differentiation. Zhang Sheng, general manager of Lawson Shanghai, once described the balance between them in terms of MSG and salt: "PB and NB are like MSG and salt. You can't cook without salt, but if it's all salt there's no differentiation."

FamilyMart's new-product scoring is aimed mainly at PB products. It covers about seven dimensions: appearance, taste, portion size, value for money, innovation, seasoning and purchase intent.

Each dimension is worth up to 5 points, for a maximum of 35. The final result is the total divided by five, giving a single average score. Every product needs at least 30 valid questionnaires to average; 3.2 is the pass mark.

I tried scoring one of the shepherd's purse wontons. I gave the seasoning a generous 5 and docked a little on taste because the wrapper was slightly tough, which came out at 4.2 — already a rather "polite" score, I was told. The session's actual verdict on that product was 3.7, which also passed.

One part of the scoring defeated me. I had no idea whether FamilyMart had launched a shepherd's purse and wood ear wonton before, so I couldn't score "innovation." Someone explained: FamilyMart had sold similar products, but the way the sauce packet sits inside this packaging was a first.

Seen that way, the more experienced the taster, the harsher the scoring — because they also carry the whole private-brand range in their heads and can place any new item in that grid quickly and professionally.

Apparently no product has ever scored a perfect 5, and even scores above 4 are rare. So 3.2 is no small achievement. Products that don't pass are quite likely sent back to be rebuilt from scratch.

The beef jerky tasted that day, for instance, had been through testing before and failed, apparently because the beef wasn't good enough at the time.

Which brings us back to the rule mentioned at the start: no comments while tasting.

"Sometimes our senior leadership comes to the session too. If one of them takes a bite and says, what is this, it's awful, that's bound to affect how objectively everyone else scores," Wang Yiwen said.

"So even senior leadership doesn't comment?"

"No." Every newcomer to the session has the rule spelled out, Wang said, and it is repeated before each session starts.

Honestly, it's hard to keep. Counting the noises that escaped me while eating, I broke it five or six times at least.

Beyond taste and looks, what else goes into the choice?

Taste and looks matter most, of course. Looks largely decide the first purchase; taste decides whether anyone buys it again.

Beyond that, there's the question of whether a product's format suits a convenience store — "suits" here meaning matched to the customer. Big bags of rice, big jugs of cooking oil and liquor all sell poorly in convenience stores, which has to do with the piecemeal way convenience store shoppers buy. So a convenience store sells only small bottles of oil, never 5-liter jugs, and its rice comes in small packs sized for people living alone.

Brand matters a great deal too. With so little shelf space, usually only the leading brand in a category gets on. Convenience stores in different regions carry different brands of the same product because brands hold different shares in different markets.

FamilyMart in Shanghai sells only Raid mosquito coils. Go to Guangzhou and nobody buys Raid; the famous local brand there is Lanju, which almost nobody in Shanghai has heard of. Information like this comes mainly from third-party research firms.

For that reason a convenience store's shelves are treated as a weather vane for the fast-moving consumer goods market. Want to know which brand sells best? Walk into a convenience store.

NB products at the session are judged largely on this front. Does it suit a convenience store? Is the price right? What's its advantage over rival products in the same category?

Li Ye, FamilyMart's merchandising department manager, told QDaily: "By the time an NB product reaches the session, those questions have basically been settled. What's left to discuss is mostly the terms of the deal."

Terms of the deal means more than the retail price: it covers the sales cycle and after-sales issues as well. With a new product from a startup, for instance, the store will negotiate a return clause fairly carefully, so unsold stock can go back.

Conversely, as you'd imagine, the fast-moving consumer goods and food giants come to the table with more leverage and hold firmer on price and terms. More and more manufacturers now choose a single convenience chain to launch a new product first, so on this front stores and brands still need each other.

These trends, too, are visible on convenience store shelves…

Start with tie-ins to whatever is in the air.

This is a big year for sport, and some of the products in the list above were laid on for Euro Cup and Olympics fans. Energy drinks, body paint sticks and five-spice edamame amount to a "fan's combo."

Zootopia fever has passed, but more Disney-themed goods will still appear this summer on the end-cap display — the shelf facing the checkout counter, the best spot in the store. That's because it's the school holidays, and students are arriving in Shanghai from out of town to visit Disneyland.

Drinks, meanwhile, increasingly sell themselves on health, and mixed juices keep gaining ground. Blending flavors rounds out the taste while leaning less on sweeteners.

On packaging, these health drinks have all landed on a very "slender" bottle, closer to what women shoppers want in both volume and feel in the hand. As for whether they look good, that's a matter of taste.

Either way, plump or slim, a distinctive figure helps a drink stand out on the shelf and catch a shopper's eye.

As we noted in How Convenience Stores Arrange Things to Catch Your Eye, Your Heart, and Your Wallet, small-pack snacks and candy are on the rise: convenience store shopping is about a need anytime, anywhere, not about the bargain of a big bag.

What convenience stores pick among puffed snacks has changed too. "We brought in some imported ones. At first the pitch was non-fried, and last year we imported corn-based puffed snacks from the US, which were popular for a while as well. The selling point was health," Li Ye said.

Imported snacks are part of how convenience stores set themselves apart; look closely at a few foreign-invested chains and you'll see clear differences in how far each is willing to go with imported goods. FamilyMart's view is that value for money is what counts with imported food: if an imported item can be priced close to a domestic one, that's a real selling point.

Beyond the tasting session, there are bigger product shows

On top of the twice-monthly sessions, FamilyMart holds two large product shows a year: spring/summer in April and autumn/winter in October. They are aimed at every store manager and store supervisor, an estimated 4,000 people each time.

A show that size means renting an exhibition hall. Each day is split into several shifts, with a few hundred people per shift touring and tasting together — a vast product-review process. For now it is mainly FamilyMart's stores in South China and East China that hold shows like this.

Take this summer's "shake cup" cold noodles: FamilyMart prepared several thousand shake cups at the spring/summer show so every store manager could try one. Paper evaluation sheets were no longer workable, so scoring was done through a WeChat system, or by sticking a sticker on the wall, which shows the result at a glance.

The displays at the show are broken apart, too. A product will be shown on the shelf level of the end-cap display where it is meant to go, but the space as a whole isn't laid out to a convenience store's proportions.

That may still sound abstract, so here are the photos.