Most condiment makers hand one city to one exclusive distributor to keep things simple, then spend years managing the leverage that distributor accumulates — Haitian never lets a single distributor get big enough to matter.

the problem

an exclusive local distributor accumulates enough leverage over time to dictate terms back to the manufacturer that created it

background

what everyone would do

The standard consumer-goods playbook was appointing one exclusive distributor per city, simplifying management, contracts and coordination to a single relationship per market, the approach nearly every condiment maker used to minimize channel complexity.

what they saw

Haitian saw that the simplicity of a single exclusive distributor came with a hidden long-term cost, over years that distributor would inevitably become indispensable, controlling the manufacturer's only route to retailers in that city and accumulating enough leverage to extract better terms, slower payment, or the implicit threat of switching to a rival brand. Rather than accepting that tradeoff for administrative simplicity, the fix was deliberately installing at least two competing distributors in every city from the start, a 'dual-chariot' structure ensuring no individual partner's cooperation was ever indispensable enough to negotiate the company into worse terms as it grew.

the move

Haitian deliberately installs at least two competing first-tier distributors in the same city or region rather than one, a structure sometimes described internally as its 'dual-chariot' (双驾马车) system: the distributors compete for volume and can be swapped out or reduced if they underperform, and no individual distributor is ever the sole route to that market. The company backs this with tight, digitized channel management, tracking inventory and pricing distributor by distributor to keep visibility even as the number of relationships multiplies.

why it works

Installing competing distributors in the same market meant each one knew it could be swapped out or reduced if it underperformed, since Haitian always had a fallback route to retailers in that city, removing the structural leverage a sole exclusive partner would otherwise accumulate simply by being the only path to market. Backing the structure with tight, digitized channel management, tracking inventory and pricing distributor by distributor, let Haitian maintain real visibility and control even as the number of relationships multiplied into the thousands, avoiding the coordination chaos that would normally make managing many overlapping partners impractical. This is why Haitian's distributor base grew to over 7,000 partners by 2022 with no single relationship carrying outsized weight, its top five customers combined accounted for only about 2.18 percent of total sales in 2023, an exceptionally low concentration that gave the company permanent negotiating leverage across its entire network rather than accumulating dependency on any individual partner over time.

the payoff

Haitian's distributor base has run into the thousands of independent partners, over 7,000 as of 2022 and still more than 6,700 by the end of 2024 even after active pruning of underperformers, and no single relationship carries outsized weight: distributor and dealer sales together made up roughly 97 to 98 percent of Haitian's total revenue from 2022 to 2024, spread thinly enough that its top five customers combined accounted for only about 2.18 percent of total sales in 2023, an exceptionally low concentration for a company of its scale.

where it breaks

The mechanism depends on the manufacturer actually having the operational and technological capacity to manage many overlapping distributor relationships without losing visibility or control, a company without Haitian's digitized, distributor-by-distributor tracking system would face real coordination overhead and risk chaos rather than genuine leverage from fragmenting its channel this way. It also depends on there being enough genuine distributor demand and market size in each city to sustain multiple competing partners profitably, a smaller or thinner market might not support two viable distributors each earning enough volume to remain motivated competitors rather than both struggling and underperforming. And deliberately fragmenting the channel trades away some of the deeper, more invested relationship a single exclusive distributor might build with a manufacturer's specific brand and territory, meaning a category where distributor-level brand advocacy, deep local market knowledge, or long-term relationship investment matters more than raw negotiating leverage might actually benefit more from the simpler exclusive-partner model Haitian deliberately avoided.

what came after

Haitian's distributor structure is cited in Chinese consumer-goods and channel-management analysis as a rare example of a manufacturer engineering channel fragmentation on purpose, trading the simplicity of exclusive territories for permanent negotiating leverage over every partner in its network — a structure credited alongside its product breadth as part of why the company has remained China's dominant condiment maker for decades.

references

1. [1]强者愈强：海天味业增长，竞品们下滑丨食饮财报观察21世纪经济报道 (21st Century Business Herald), 202521jingji.com
2. [2]海天味业经销商管理模式在哪些方面领先竞争对手雪球 (Xueqiu), 2024xueqiu.com

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