On October 15, the 115th National Sugar and Wine Fair, widely acclaimed as the bellwether of the industry, was grandly inaugurated at the Nanjing International Expo Center. Themed "Sweet at Both Ends," this year's fair focuses on three core priorities: "Export to China," "Healthy China," and the "Autumn Sugar Season." It deeply integrates industry and city, domestic and international markets, and tradition and innovation, presenting an industry gala that combines business matchmaking, technological innovation, supply-demand matchmaking, and consumption stimulation. Li Guoqiang, Secretary of the CPC Leadership Group and Chairman of COFCO, stated that this year's fair closely aligns with the mission of serving people's livelihoods and empowering the industry. It highlights an international consumption orientation, aligns with the "Export to China" series of events, focuses on the main thread of nutrition and health, and promotes in-depth matchmaking among scientific research, industry, and capital. Zhou Hongbo, Member of the Standing Committee of the Jiangsu Provincial CPC Committee and Secretary of the Nanjing Municipal CPC Committee, noted that Nanjing will take this opportunity to use the fair as a medium to expand and upgrade consumption, and use the conference as a bridge to promote the integration of industry and technology, thereby building an international consumption center city at a higher level.
The total exhibition area of this year's fair reaches approximately 180,000 square meters, gathering over 3,500 domestic and international exhibitors and buyers, and showcasing hundreds of thousands of products. The venue is bustling with massive crowds, and the atmosphere for business matchmaking is vibrant. It features 10 major core exhibition zones and 16 specialized category zones, comprehensively covering core categories such as alcoholic beverages, leisure snacks, condiments, and food raw materials and ingredients. The massive scale of participation not only provides a precise supply-demand matchmaking platform for upstream and downstream enterprises but also intuitively reflects the strong endogenous driving force of the food and beverage industry.
This year's fair integrates its development into national strategies and is committed to building an efficient and coordinated matchmaking platform. For the first time, the fair has been included in the Ministry of Commerce's annual event list for "Export to China." An "Export to China" exhibition zone has been set up, gathering products from 31 source countries and exhibition groups from 16 countries and regions. During the fair, the "Export to China" Sugar and Wine Industry Matchmaking Conference was held, smoothing the two-way channel for high-quality overseas products to delve into the Chinese market and for premium domestic products to sail into the global market, thus playing an important role in building the new development pattern of dual circulation.
Meanwhile, this year's fair focuses on driving qualitative industrial transformation through technological innovation. Closely aligned with the "Healthy China" strategy, it has set up thematic zones for the first time, including health wines, beverages based on the dual use of medicine and food, health foods, and technological services. Specially creating the "Food Science and Technology Achievements Exhibition," it has invited 24 research institutes and universities, including Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, and Jiangnan University, to showcase nearly 1,000 cutting-edge achievements on site. These cover fields such as synthetic biology, precision nutrition, and future foods, accelerating the deep integration of industry, academia, research, and application, and injecting technological momentum into the transformation and upgrading of the industry.
As a key supporting event, the 2026 "Autumn Sugar Season" activities have been further upgraded, building a "1+1+5+N" event matrix to bring high-quality products from the exhibition booths into communities, scenic spots, commercial districts, universities, and metropolitan areas. During the "Autumn Sugar Season," Nanjing will host over 200 consumption promotion events, building a closed loop of "online traffic generation, offline experience, and consumption conversion." This "exhibition-city integration" model effectively transforms the professional traffic of the fair into incremental urban consumption, comprehensively stimulating the consumption potential of the regional market.
On the first day of the fair, the venue attracted massive crowds both inside and outside the halls. In the international section, 12 countries participated for the first time, and a batch of overseas new products made their Chinese debut; in the domestic section, 9 regions formed delegations to participate for the first time. Multiple high-profile conferences and events were held intensively, including the 2026 Alcoholic Beverage Trendy Products Promotion Conference, the "Export to China" Sugar and Wine Industry Matchmaking Conference, and the Food Science and Technology Achievements Exchange Conference of the 115th National Sugar and Wine Fair. These events promoted the efficient matching of technological demands with cutting-edge technologies, making openness and integration the defining feature of the high-quality development of the food and alcoholic beverage industry.