Feeding Chinese Infants with Danish formula

Chinese parents have increasingly turned to foreign infant formula following a series of milk powder scandals in the mid-2000s, leading to the rise of daigou, an informal transnational business channel that provides access to overseas products. However, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly constrained this “grey market”. Drawing on two periods of ethnographic research in Denmark and China from 2018 to 2022, this article explores how consumers and daigou operators navigate the complexities of food supply for young children before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Their risk management strategies have been developed within a framework of adaptive trust, which is a context-specific aspect of trust relationships that are established, maintained, or modified in response to evolving social, environmental, or economic conditions.