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SYDNEY, Oct. 19 (Xinhua) -- Australia's most loved breakfast cereal "Weet-Bix" will soon be known as "Nutri-Brex" to its China-based consumer by mid-November in hopes of enticing more consumers towards the iconic Aussie brand.
A spokesperson for Sanitarium Health & Wellbeing, an Australian-owned health food company who owns the cereal brand told Xinhua on Wednesday that name changed was necessary to help Chinese consumers differentiate between an existing China-based cereal brand that had the same name sounding as "Weet-Bix" in the country.
"We want to build a strong and distinctive brand for our Chinese consumers and that can be done by recognising our brand better," the spokesperson said, in reference to the name change.
While the size of the Chinese breakfast cereal market is difficult to quantify, Sanitarium said its 2015/16 financial figures for its breakfast cereal sales rose by approximately 50 percent, and conservatively forecasts similar growth in the next financial period.
At present, current data by Sanitarium suggests that about 15 percent of Chinese households make a regular breakfast cereal purchase, compared to 90 percent in Australia.
However, the trend in China for Western-style breakfast cereals is growing from international brands with a strong focus on health and food safety.
This discovery was what lead Sanitarium to recently open an office in Shanghai after exporting the cereal to China for the last eight years.
The new re-branding exercises is expected to allow Sanitarium to seize on an opportunity to build a strong, distinctive brand for the largest emerging ready-to-eat cereal market in the world, while complying with a new trademark restrictions that are now coming into place.
"Different to the iconic Weet-Bix product in name only, Nutri-Brex is made in the same factories, using the same ingredients and the same traditional recipe that Sanitarium has used for almost 90 years,' Todd Saunders, General Manager, Sanitarium Health & Wellbeing Australia said in a statement on Tuesday.
The company said it's the same name it uses for Weet-Bix in the UK, which is its second biggest export market.
"Despite the recent success we've enjoyed, it is still relatively early days for Sanitarium in China," Saunders said.
In May this year, a marketing exercise undertaken by the company to place the hugely popular Weet-Bix product on a Chinese TV soap, Ode to Joy had paid off exponentially.
In the immediate aftermath, sales for the cereal brand in mainland China had soared, exceeding forecast expectations, the company said.
"That's why the timing to change brand names while Chinese consumer awareness of Weet-Bix is at its highest actually works," Saunders said.
The recent name change of the product represents Sanitarium's biggest push into China to date, will be supported by a digitally-focused marketing campaign which also aims to raise awareness among Chinese consumers of Sanitarium.
"Nutri-Brex is expected" to be sold in over 1,500 stores nationwide in China and multiple e-commerce channels from mid-November.
Currently online sales, predominantly through Sanitarium's flagship store on Alibaba's TMall platform, represent more than half of all sales of Sanitarium product in China.
