Online Cereal Brand WANGBAOBAO Closes Series A Led by Source Code Capital and Vertex Ventures China

源码资本·December 26, 2019·1·4

This year at the Tmall Double 11 Shopping Festival, WANGBAOBAO took the top spot among cereal brands on Tmall, with annual sales up more than 20x.

WANGBAOBAO, the leading online cereal brand in China's new consumer space, recently completed its Series A funding round, co-led by Source Code Capital and Vertex Ventures China, with Decent Capital, an existing angel-round investor, participating. The investment will help WANGBAOBAO continue building its brand influence. Earlier this January, WANGBAOBAO had already raised a multimillion-yuan angel round from Kaitai Capital and Decent Capital.

Following this round, the company will continue to prioritize product innovation while accelerating omnichannel brand operations.

WANGBAOBAO officially launched its cereal line in May 2018, positioning itself around "high-aesthetics meal-replacement grains." Targeting the pain point of modern consumers who "love to eat but fear gaining weight," the brand entered the market with low-temperature baked oats, offering young consumers diverse consumption scenarios for "delicious food that won't make you fat."

Since entering the meal-replacement grain market, WANGBAOBAO has consistently delivered strong performance. In its first official participation in Tmall's Double 11 shopping festival this year, it claimed the top spot among cereal brands on the platform, with annual sales growing more than 20-fold. The brand has also received accolades including the 2019 Tmall Food "Most Popular Among Consumers" award, the Tmall 618 "Industry Innovation Award," and Yicai CBNData's "Most Popular Emerging Meal-Replacement Grain Brand."

Yao Jing, Founder & CEO of WANGBAOBAO

Jihong Zhang, board member at Source Code Capital, commented: "As a superfood, oats are healthy, filling, and versatile in usage scenarios — they have nurtured world-class food companies like Quaker and Kellogg's, and provided new growth momentum for Calbee. New consumer innovation is one of Source Code Capital's key focus areas that we have tracked and researched over the long term. WANGBAOBAO has redefined consumers' perception and imagination of cereal through multi-layered innovation in category, product, and marketing, bringing 'good-looking, delicious, healthy, and satisfying' offerings to more consumers and into more consumption scenarios, accelerating the industry's incremental growth. Today, WANGBAOBAO remains a very young company. We look forward to Jenny leading the team to not dwell on past achievements but charge forward boldly, continuously achieving new breakthroughs while co-creating a beautiful, healthy lifestyle with users!"

Xu Ying, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures China, noted that WANGBAOBAO's breakout from the cereal market in just one year stems from the management team's insight into consumer trends and their grasp of new media marketing methods. With new-generation consumers at the core, the company is committed to providing nutritious, healthy, yet diverse and delicious cereal products, rapidly capturing consumer mindshare.

In today's China consumer market, Gen Z and post-00s consumers have become the dominant force. They possess not only strong willingness to spend but also distinct consumer personalities and independent judgment. When it comes to food, beyond pursuing quality, they seek "aesthetics" and "slimness," gravitating toward low-sugar, low-fat, nutritious meal-replacement products. However, most meal replacements on the market are powder-based with insufficient satiety, while traditional grain meal replacements are too bland — leaving significant white space in the market.

In response, the WANGBAOBAO team abandoned traditional Western-style naked oats and puffed oat production processes, adopting low-temperature baking to improve taste while preserving the fiber and nutrition of oats. They added prebiotics to create genuinely high-fiber cereal; eliminated white sugar or honey, using nearly zero-calorie natural stevia glycosides as a sugar substitute, reducing excessive sweetness while making the product healthier.

Image source: WANGBAOBAO

Driven by its pursuit of product innovation and multi-dimensional disruption of consumers' traditional perception of cereal, WANGBAOBAO chose to build its own factory to solve supply chain challenges, thereby creating stronger product capabilities.

1. Flavor Innovation

WANGBAOBAO was the first cereal brand to add large yogurt chunks and large dried fruit pieces. While previous products tended toward "balanced ingredients," the WANGBAOBAO team's research concluded that "chunky" foods deliver a greater sense of happiness. They further stimulated consumers' taste buds with flavor labels tailored to young consumers' personalized preferences, such as "meat floss lover," "matcha lover," and "peach oolong."

2. Scenario Upgrade

The baked cereal series is ready to eat straight from the bag, with small portable packages for convenience; the konjac porridge series targets breakfast preparation and fitness needs. Lazy light breakfasts, refined office afternoon teas, late-night guilt-free snacks — WANGBAOBAO cereal makes consumption scenarios unlimited, better fitting young people's current lifestyles.

3. Aesthetics Upgrade

From high-aesthetics, manga-inspired external visual presentation to the color coordination of "large fruit chunks" and "abundant dried fruit" contents, WANGBAOBAO has won over large numbers of post-90s and post-95s consumers. Pairing with milk, yogurt, toast, and salads to create more innovative eating methods gives WANGBAOBAO inherent DIY appeal.

Image source: WANGBAOBAO

Industry growth also brings a flood of similar products, and building differentiation has remained one of the key challenges for new domestic brands. On this, WANGBAOBAO founder Yao Jing believes that the company's first-mover advantage is quite evident: currently, 90% of users entering through Taobao search for "WANGBAOBAO" specifically (rather than "cereal"), and for many consumers, cereal simply is WANGBAOBAO.

Going forward, WANGBAOBAO will remain consumer-centric, moving from online to offline and meeting users' diverse scenario needs with varied products. Through channel expansion and deeper operational strategies, WANGBAOBAO will extend its consumer asset base from online to multiple offline core scenarios, becoming more three-dimensional, multi-dimensional, and refined, thereby achieving brand accumulation and deepening.