JiYang: Pioneering the Rise of Medical Nutrition in China Through Education, Professional Training, and Innovative Service Models

How to Summarize Your 2019? PL, Founder of Ji Yang, Gave the Answer: “Airplanes, High-Speed Rail, and Didi.”

2019 marked the fifth year of Ji Yang’s entrepreneurial journey, and it was also an extremely busy year for its founder, PL. She stated, “Over the past five years, Ji Yang’s growth pace has been slower than that of most startups in China, largely because the core founding team, including myself, was unable to return to China for a period of time.”

“How can we tap into the Chinese market without returning to China?” In July 2019, PL made up his mind to return from Canada to China.

Jiyang is dedicated to exploring the relationship between nutrition and human health, aiming to promote the development of medical nutrition in China.Currently, Ji Yang operates the new media platform “Ji Yang Vision” and the online professional nutrition education platform “Ji Yang Academy,” while also providing customized nutritional health content and consulting services for enterprises.

Upon returning to China, PL entered a busy and highly efficient work mode. In 2019, Ji Yang began collaborating with multiple well-known domestic enterprises and official institutions to explore new models of nutrition services. Additionally, Ji Yang, which had previously been scarcely involved in consumer-facing (B2C) business, started to lay out services and target segmented markets for individual consumers.

It can be said that with PL’s return to China, Ji Yang has hit the fast-forward button on its development, gaining the momentum for rapid growth and emerging as a rising startup star in China’s medical nutrition sector.

As early as 400 BC, Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, recognized that the human body possesses an innate capacity for self-healing, advocating to “let food be thy medicine.” Dr. Linus Pauling, a laureate of both the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, also stated, “Optimum nutrition is the medicine of tomorrow.”

Years of providing brand strategy consulting services to well-known food companies laid the groundwork for PL’s eventual entry into the nutrition sector. Shortly after immigrating to Canada, PL conceived the idea of launching a venture in the field of nutrition.

Initially, her idea was straightforward and rudimentary: to sell high-quality nutritional supplements from the North American market to China via cross-border e-commerce. However, after in-depth industry research, PL realized that the value of the nutrition industry in China extends far beyond this, and there are more valuable opportunities to pursue.

PL stated, “Nutrition plays a vital role in disease prevention and treatment; however, in China, the concept of nutritional therapy remains relatively underdeveloped, and the importance of nutrition is significantly underestimated.”In the treatment and rehabilitation of diseases, nutrition should be accorded equal importance to pharmaceuticals; however, in reality, it is often relegated to a mere adjunctive therapy, facing numerous obstacles.Outside of hospitals, when it comes to nutrition, people’s immediate reaction is “dietary supplements,” as if nutritional supplementation equates to taking such products; dietitians are even labeled as “supplement salespeople.”

Mindful of the numerous pain points in China’s nutrition practice sector, PL abandoned the idea of selling products and instead focused on building a science-based nutrition education platform and exploring models for nutritional intervention services. She joked, “If we had stuck with cross-border e-commerce, we would likely have already earned our first pot of gold.”Dedicating ourselves to building a science and education platform inevitably meant forgoing rapid monetization in the early stages of our venture. Although we relinquished this path to quick profits, over the nearly five years since our inception, PL and the team have remained steadfast in their original entrepreneurial mission, upholding their genuine passion and belief in the field of nutrition.

PL summarized the pain points in China's nutrition practice field:First, there is an insufficient knowledge base; second, there is a relative scarcity of talent.To address these two major pain points, the key lies in “education.”

It is well known that popularizing science and educating the market require long-term, substantial investment. PL firmly believes that the potential demand for nutrition is enormous and will inevitably become a prevailing trend in the development of the broader health industry. However, over the past few years, apart from selling products, it has been genuinely difficult to identify more effective business monetization models, largely because end consumers are not yet ready.“While the consumer market remains immature, starting with the business sector is a viable path. Moreover, I believe that the rise of any industry must begin with an awakening from within.”

Consequently, Ji Yang began offering services to the B2B market, serving as a science and education communicator, a vocational educator, and a provider of professional medical nutrition content and consulting services. To date, Ji Yang has achieved the three-phase development goals established at its inception.

In April 2015, Ji Yang launched “Ji Yang Vision,” a new media platform dedicated to science education in the nutrition industry. “Ji Yang Vision” broadens its perspective to encompass various dimensions of nutritional science, committing itself to an in-depth exploration of the relationships between nutrition, human health, and the living environment. The platform’s audience primarily consists of healthcare professionals, such as physicians, dietitians, health managers, and research scholars, who possess substantial professional knowledge, with some even being experts in specific subfields. This presents a significant challenge to the professionalism and accuracy of the articles published on “Ji Yang Vision.”

PL stated that the sustained production of high-quality professional content by *Ji Yang Shi Jie* is inseparable from the unwavering, selfless dedication of its editorial team. The two editors-in-chief hold a Ph.D. in Human Nutrition from Cornell University and completed postdoctoral training in Biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), respectively, boasting profound professional expertise. Leading a team of scholars from both China and abroad, they have devoted their skills and passion to nutrition science communication. It is this commitment that has enabled *Ji Yang Shi Jie*, as a non-profit platform for public nutrition education, to achieve steadily growing popularity.

Since its inception five years ago, Ji Yang Vision has consistently maintained an independent, impartial, and objective approach to popularizing scientific knowledge. Upholding the internet spirit of “openness, sharing, and collective strength,” it has earned widespread acclaim from readers for its textbook-level professional content, with its trending articles and features frequently drawing significant attention and sparking lively discussions among industry professionals.Today, *Ji Yang Vision* has become an essential tool for many readers in their daily study and work. Whenever they encounter nutritional topics with questions, they can look up keywords to obtain comprehensive interpretations from various perspectives.

In 2016, Ji Yang began to bridge the gap between overseas Chinese nutritional scientists, nutrition consultants, and clinical dietitians and China’s domestic nutrition diagnosis and treatment market, dedicated to delivering forward-looking, precise, personalized nutrition intervention solutions to medical and health management institutions in China with substantial demand.

To date, Ji Yang has established a one-stop consulting and outsourcing service model, encompassing customized health science content, product and service R&D, professional team training, remote diagnosis and treatment support, business process planning, and corporate strategic transformation consulting.Our primary partners include clinics, pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology firms, and health-and-wellness real estate developers.

PL stated that a major pain point hindering the development of China’s nutrition industry is the inadequacy of the dietitian training system. “Due to unclear career pathways and poor job prospects, clinical nutrition has gradually ‘disappeared’ from university curricula. To promote the standardized development of the nutrition industry, cultivating specialized professionals is indispensable.”

In March 2018, Jiyang launched its professional incubator for registered dietitians in China—“Jiyang Academy.”“Ji Yang Academy” develops and offers training courses and services in critical thinking, knowledge, and skills essential for the professional development of nutrition-related professionals in China.

Jiyang’s independently developed “Practical Course Series on Elite RD Core Thinking” is based on the syllabus of the two-year Master of Clinical Nutrition program at renowned U.S. universities and medical centers, and was designed and developed in conjunction with MNT (Medical Nutrition Therapy) guidelines and clinical practices from the United States, Australia, and Canada. The course is highly suitable for in-service training of clinical dietitians, marking a pioneering step in vocational education for medical nutrition therapy in China.

It is worth mentioning that “Ji Yang Academy” places great emphasis on"Customer-Centric"Practical Consulting Mindset. PL lamented, “When providing one-on-one consultations to clients, relying solely on professional knowledge is far from sufficient. At times, the more extensive one’s professional expertise, the more powerless one may feel when facing clients.” Clinicians may fall into the erroneous perception of the doctor-patient relationship that “I am the professional; you must listen to me,” which is precisely a major taboo in nutritional counseling. “Every excellent nutrition consultant must be at least half a psychological counselor.”In addition to theoretical courses, the college also offers supervised practical sessions led by experienced overseas clinical dietitians, helping students master the essential skills of nutritional counseling.

According to PL, the majority of students at “Jiyang Academy” are clinical practitioners, including attending physicians, chief physicians, and nutritionists. “Only clinical nutrition professionals working on the front lines can fully appreciate the true value of the EliteRD course series.”

PL believes that the consumer market presents greater challenges than the business-to-business (B2B) market, with significant differences in marketing and operational strategies. Factors such as consumer awareness and customer acquisition costs are potential hurdles. Nevertheless, Ji Yang has been actively exploring the right approach to enter the consumer market.

For a long time, health consumption in China has remained firmly in the era of product-based consumption, with little market presence for service-oriented consumption. After returning to China in 2019, PL observed emerging signs of maturation in the consumer (C-end) market. In 2020, Ji Yang Hui would focus on exploring viable business models for the C-end market.

Furthermore, the sudden outbreak of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020 spurred activity in both online medical consultations and online education, revealing to PL an opportunity to develop online nutritional counseling services. Moving forward, Ji Yang will leverage high-quality overseas registered dietitian resources to launch online nutrition and health consultation services.

Nutrition, mental well-being, and physical exercise are three inseparable pillars of health. In recent years, public attention has increasingly focused on mental and physical health, giving rise to several innovative leading platforms in these fields. PL believes that the golden age of nutrition has arrived, and the next decade will witness the emergence of entirely new service models, ushering in a period of vibrant growth.