Shili Nutrition: Delivering Integrated Health Management Services with a 'Trinity Model' Within One Year of Establishment and 500+ Clients Served

The broader health sector is a “long slope with deep snow” track. The Outline of the Healthy China 2030 Plan points out that by 2030, the scale of China’s health industry will expand significantly, with the total size of the health services sector reaching RMB 16 trillion.

Capital firms in the primary market have long sensed the shifting industry trends and have been increasing their investments. In the first half of 2021, a total of 1,591 financing deals were completed globally in the healthcare sector, with the total amount raised reaching a record high for any first half year on record. This figure even surpassed the full-year financing total of 2019, amounting to $61.26 billion (approximately RMB 516.93 billion), representing a year-on-year increase of about 94%. Consequently, the sector has entered a phase of intense competition among numerous players.

Where Can New Growth Opportunities Be Found?

In fact, with the rising health awareness among the public, the healthcare industry is entering its golden age. Beyond the application scenarios of the disease-centric medical system, more scenarios related to health prevention and chronic disease management will emerge outside hospitals in the future, where significant value remains to be explored. Identifying niche entry points to access these broader markets also holds substantial promise.

For instance, the provision of professionally grounded health content, along with people-centered, personalized health management solutions and services, represents one such niche scenario.

“The health industry faces three extreme issues. First, it is often in conflict with and excluded from the existing medical system. Second, clinical diagnostic and treatment mindsets are still applied under the concept of health management. Third, changing users’ lifestyles and dietary patterns appears to go against human nature, requiring a considerable amount of time for users to adapt. Therefore, a comprehensive and systematic health management program should collaborate with the medical system to establish a mutually supportive co-guidance model, enabling health management and physicians to complement each other. In this process, professional ‘companionship guidance’ is particularly important.”Zhang Hongyu, founder of Jinan Shili Nutrition and Health Consulting Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Shili Nutrition”), stated.

The Shili Nutrition team is composed of functional medicine physicians, health management specialists, and registered dietitians, each fulfilling their respective roles and contributing their professional expertise throughout the service process.

In its people-centric health management services, Shili Nutrition adopts a “three-specialist co-management” model for fat loss and chronic disease management. Covering the entire process from data collection to assessment, management, and monitoring, this approach ensures that one dedicated team serves each individual client, guiding them to establish new lifestyle habits and dietary patterns.

Shili Nutrition is committed to transforming health education into health management by delivering professional, empathetic health education content and providing people-centric, personalized health management solutions and services. We tailor customized health plans for our clients to fulfill the true purpose of health management—partnering with users to cultivate a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle. Building on this foundation, we connect with a broader audience by offering e-commerce services, thereby creating a self-sustaining value loop while meeting user needs.

On the other hand, by implementing specialized industry knowledge and skills, as well as enhancing foundational general competencies, we help healthcare professionals evolve into versatile, high-caliber independent talents. We also provide them with platforms for practical application and revenue generation, enabling them to realize their professional value.

People-centric consulting services are the core focus of Shili Nutrition.

“In fact,The essence of health management is, in fact, professional companionship and advisory services—not big data, high-end instruments, apps, or various dietary supplements., these are merely auxiliary tools within the comprehensive health management program, constituting a component of the overall strategy and exhibiting high substitutability.The sector’s demand for professionalism is reflected in its person-to-person service model.“The temperature of this model represents its irreplaceable core value and competitiveness,” said Zhang Hongyu.

In this process, consultants leverage their professional expertise and industry skills to provide guidance to users. Meanwhile, by relying on the internal practitioner-led health management service framework, they conduct information collection, assessment, implementation, and follow-up management for clients, empowering them to become self-managers of their lifestyle.

“There is no one-size-fits-all solution that works perfectly for everyone. Each individual possesses unique genetic predispositions and distinct metabolic characteristics. At Shili Nutrition, we are committed to continuously refining health management plans in collaboration with our clients, tailoring personalized lifestyle management strategies for each person. Meanwhile, this approach also serves as a key pathway to integrating with medical consortiums and connecting with e-commerce platforms.”

Shili Nutrition has established its subsidiary e-commerce platform, Shili Haowu.Convert long-accumulated customers into platform traffic and loyal purchasing power, sell essential nutrients and health foods in health management plans on the basis of quality assurance, and form a community e-commerce matrix centered on consulting services and health management.

Just as Baidu aims to build a content ecosystem through its search engine portal to connect users with doctors, while leveraging its technological capabilities to deeply explore the industry chain and drive the entire ecosystem toward service-oriented and personalized upgrades, Shili Nutrition shares a similar vision.

To date, Shili Nutrition, established just one year ago, has served over 500 clients with personalized fat loss and chronic disease management programs, while providing professional, systematic health education to more than 2,000 individual consumers. The company has partnered with eight B-side institutions across China, primarily private hospitals, health checkup centers, and traditional Chinese and Western medicine clinics. Shili Nutrition is leveraging shared user resources and implementing professional health management skills through its systems to collaboratively address chronic disease challenges.

Collaboration with Private Hospitals

Shili Nutrition will next focus more on brand positioning, concentrating its efforts on a select few high-value business areas. From a market perspective, it will drive growth in both B2B and B2C segments simultaneously. By positioning itself as a companion for a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle, Shili Nutrition will integrate professional nutrition and health management expertise and content into everyday life.

Shili Nutrition divides its education sector into two systems: internal and external.

Internally, it focuses on practitioner development, specifically the advanced personal growth pathway for health industry professionals. This primarily includes systematic and practical expertise in nutrition and health management, essential industry skills, and the cultivation of foundational general competencies such as instructional abilities, content and product R&D capabilities, communication skills, personal IP building, and aesthetic sensibility. These competencies are applied to industry practice in stages to cultivate multidisciplinary talent.

For external users, Shili Nutrition has established an annual community for its “High Food Quotient” Women’s Study Camp, providing professional content to women interested in topics such as fat loss, thyroid health, preconception care, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), parental health management, pediatric nutrition, and infant complementary feeding. Meanwhile, it engages registered dietitians, health managers, and medical professionals as content contributors. Centered on diet, lifestyle, and disease-specific precautions, the platform has developed a systematic science-based education framework to avoid the dissemination of fragmented information.

“‘People-centric and compassionate’ service models inevitably incur relatively higher costs, but I believe it is meaningful if our services and content help people understand what is correct and scientific, and inspire them to make changes. Meaningful endeavors are always slow and challenging. Although some may question the feasibility of allocating labor costs to health education and health management services, I believe it is undoubtedly worthwhile. In the future, service models across all industries will undoubtedly become personalized and customized,” Zhang Hongyu told VCBeat.

Zhang Hongyu, the founder of Shili Nutrition, is a woman born in the 1990s. After graduating from a university in Fujian Province and working in Beijing for three years, she—despite not having an academic background in medicine or nutrition—ultimately decided to enter the nutritional health industry and launched her startup in Jinan.

The idea for the startup stemmed from a personal experience.

“During my second year of working in Beijing, my father was frequently hospitalized due to complications from diabetes, and I myself struggled with obesity. Consequently, I began to prioritize my health and engaged for the first time in paid consultations and supportive management services provided by a dietitian, which led to some improvement in my weight.”

“Since then, I have become passionate about nutrition. Little did I know that from the day I stumbled into this field, I would never stop; no matter how many jobs I changed, I continued to study and practice in my spare time,” said Zhang Hongyu.

At the end of 2018, at the invitation of a friend, Zhang Hongyu went to Jinan to help her friend establish a vocational training school for health managers, which became the catalyst for her transition into the health industry.

There, all the students she encountered were either planning to switch careers or had already entered the nutrition and health sector. However, she soon discovered a disconnect between “wanting to do” and “being able to do” among these eager talents and the market. Certified professionals often lacked opportunities for hands-on practice, and there was an insufficiently integrated workflow linking technical expertise with client services. As a result, most practitioners entered the field relying solely on their personal experience.

How to apply knowledge in practice is a critical issue facing many professionals. Addressing these challenges, Zhang Hongyu transcended the practitioner’s mindset and proposed solutions from an industry-wide perspective.

She decided to establish her own brand, aiming on one hand to help practitioners strengthen their industry-specific skills and professional expertise while enhancing their general competencies, and on the other hand to explore effective health management service models that are acceptable to the Chinese public.

In January 2021, Shili Nutrition was born.

After a year of development, along with continuous trial-and-error and experience accumulation by the team in the health management sector, Shili Nutrition has identified its own positioning—as a companion for a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle. This clarity has defined the company’s next steps in strategic planning.

Zhang Hongyu stated, “In the short term, high-quality, professional science popularization content remains the foundation of Shili Nutrition’s customer services. Over the next three years, we will continue to provide professional health education and science communication, expand and grow our user base, and enhance brand influence. Meanwhile, people-centric, personalized health management services and a cost-effective e-commerce platform will be further developed on this basis to improve the overall user experience.”

Moreover, we place greater emphasis on internal talent development to cultivate more interdisciplinary professionals who possess both specialized expertise and versatile soft skills. In the future, Shili Nutrition will deeply explore the needs of mid-to-high-end customer segments, providing a series of tailored solutions and services for healthy lifestyles, thereby realizing the brand’s closed-loop value.

Zhang Hongyu is fully confident in achieving this goal, a confidence rooted in his unique focus on “people.” He emphasizes that the core competitiveness of Shili Nutrition lies in its talent. By cultivating outstanding professionals, we simultaneously provide customers with “people-centric,” precise, and personalized health management solutions.

Shili’s founding team comprises experts in health management and nutrition with a strong foundation in medical disciplines and proven ability to implement systematic solutions, alongside seasoned internet operations professionals. The team spans generations, including members born in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Guided by the principle of “leveraging each individual’s strengths,” this team integrates expertise in professional services, research and development, customer service, and operations, while continuously injecting fresh talent into its ranks.