From the delivery room to the dining table: How Taiwan’s first “confinement agency” Zili broke the boundary between mother and baby and transformed into full-age care

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Every transformation is to learn “how to take care of people” again.

Under the wave of declining birth rate, many brands that have been deeply involved in the maternal and infant industry for many years have to face a cruel reality: the market is shrinking. But in Taoyuan, one company chose to turn against the wind and turn the crisis into a turning point.

Zili Co., Ltd. (https://zilihome.com/) was founded in 2011. It started as the first postpartum care agency in Taiwan, and then expanded into its own brand, central kitchen and experiential education, and finally transformed into a comprehensive care and maintenance expert. This is not a gorgeous turn, but a long-distance race that combines realistic pressure and humanistic warmth.

Confinement brokerage is a professional consulting company or platform that provides one-stop services from pregnancy to postpartum. Its service scope covers prenatal care, booking of confinement centers, delivery of confinement meals, postpartum care, confinement nanny, confinement gifts, etc. It aims to assist expectant parents in planning and arranging a series of maternity care needs.

Starting point: Take 600,000 and take a road no one has traveled before

In 2011, Huang Qiman, who has been in the pregnancy industry for nearly 20 years, founded the first confinement agency in Taiwan: Zili Confinement Agency with only 600,000 capital. This seemingly simple decision stems from her deep observations of the industry over the years.

Huang Qiman recalled: “At that time, I saw the pain points in the market. Mothers who have been in confinement for 30 days can easily get tired of eating the same food, and the cancellation and cancellation procedures are cumbersome.” Therefore, Zili Confinement Agency came into being. Unlike traditional confinement centers or confinement meal operators, Zili plays the role of a “professional integrator” and freely combines multiple confinement meal brands, allowing mothers to obtain a variety of choices through a single window. This innovative business model quickly allowed Zili to gain a foothold in the market.

Transition: From helping others build brands to building your own brand

However, the agency model’s fate soon struck. When Zili successfully helped the cooperative brand gain popularity, she faced the dilemma of being burned by the original manufacturer. Huang Qiman said with a wry smile: “As soon as we started doing it, we were kicked away, which made us have to think about how to make it last long.”

This experience made her realize deeply: “How can we make it last long?” The answer is obvious, that is, to build our own brand.

In 2014, Zili set up its first central kitchen and launched its own brand [Juda Shengzi] (https://goodmeal.tw/). With the experience of being an agent for more than a dozen confinement meal companies, Huang Qiman clearly knows how to differentiate in the market. Tsuda Biotech directly attacks the high-end market, combines the Five Elements theory of traditional Chinese medicine and nutrition, and insists on using organic vegetables, non-toxic pork liver, and more comprehensive use of ceramic tableware to eliminate concerns about plasticizers. Once again, Tsuda Biotech has successfully established a foothold in the high-end market.

Re-evolution: Comprehensive care from body to soul

Zili’s third transformation was not for revenue, but to see a problem that the industry had never wanted to face, that is: the mother’s body was taken care of, but her emotions, stress and marriage were all left aside.

Huang Qiman said: “Many families do not have problems during childcare, but they are broken during confinement.”

In 2019, Zili made a bolder decision: investing tens of millions to build the first [Purpleseed Pregnancy Manor] (https://purpleseed.zilihome.com/) in Taiwan. It does not sell meals, but sells empathy. It provides pregnancy experience courses.

Zili Pregnancy Manor has launched two signature courses, namely the Divine Teammate Course and the [Little Nanny] (https://cher88888.pixnet.net/blog/post/70195264) course. The former allows expectant fathers to wear more than ten kilograms of weight-bearing equipment and experience the pressure of pregnancy and the simulation of labor pains. The latter allows children who are about to become brothers and sisters to learn to participate in care through role tasks and interactions, and slowly resolve their anxiety about falling out of favor through a sense of participation, allowing the family to transform from pressure to an exercise in companionship.

“There is a young couple. The wife has been thinking about divorce throughout her pregnancy because the father-in-law is a chauvinist and thinks, ‘What woman in the world doesn’t have children?’”

Huang Qiman shared a story that impressed her deeply, “But after the young father came to experience weight-bearing and childbirth, he couldn’t survive until the end. He wrote a very touching message on the spot to thank his wife. His wife said with tears in her eyes: ‘I hope we can live like this from now on.’ They told me that we saved their marriage.”

There are countless stories like this, which have transformed the Zili brand from a product supplier to a relationship repairer. Even teachers from Hong Kong flew to Taiwan specially to film experience videos and show them to their students to teach them to protect themselves.

Although this experience center receives hundreds of groups of customers a month, its income is only ten or two hundred thousand. Huang Qiman said: “Although I don’t make much money, I have saved many families.”

Digital transformation is Zili’s real second entrepreneurial venture

Taiwan is facing a crisis of declining birthrate. The number of births in recent years has plummeted from 213,000 in 2015 to 134,000 in 2024, a decrease of more than one-third. This cruel number has once again made Zili, who focuses on the maternal and childbirth market, face unprecedented challenges.

Faced with an avalanche of decline in the number of newborns in recent years, Zili made a key decision at the end of 2024: transforming the brand from specializing in fetal maintenance, pregnancy and breastfeeding meals to a provider of functional maintenance meals, and upgrading the Tsuda Life brand to specialize in providing top-value functional maintenance meals, focusing on maintenance meals for special body conditions such as pregnancy and childbirth, postoperative surgery, cancer care, and medical beauty, and providing customized services. The company’s goal is to become an all-round maintenance expert.

1. Product line reshaping: brand upgrade from “pregnancy” to “nurturing”

The brand’s new slogan has been changed to “Carefully take care of every critical moment of your life”, and it is positioned as an “all-round maintenance and care expert” and “a promoter of happiness for new families”.

“Every critical moment, whether it is confinement, illness or health care, is taken care of by us.” Huang Qiman explained the brand vision: “We hope to take care of every member of the family.”

• Coverage for all ages: In addition to the original pregnancy and lactation meals, the “Physical Body Care Series” (for post-surgery and cancer care), “Body Beauty Series” (for medical and cosmetic repairs) and “Senior Care Meals” are newly added.
• Focus strategy: including classic series and exquisite series for those with small stomachs or limited budgets. This not only disperses the risk of declining birthrate, but also successfully captures the rigid demand for long-term care and postoperative care through word-of-mouth referrals from old customers.

2. Digital transformation: introduce AI recommendation system to solve labor shortage and efficiency pain points

As the service line expands, another challenge Zili faces is: high communication costs. Traditional one-on-one LINE manual customer service can no longer meet demand.

“In the past, I had to go back and forth several times to ask a customer for their needs, and the customer was impatient and blocked it.” To this end, Zili used government subsidy resources and worked with external consultants to carry out digital optimization.

In 2025, Zili applied for a subsidy from the Ministry of Economic Affairs SIIR (Service Industry Innovation R&D Program) to invest in online service value-adding.

• Automated demand matching: Develop an online recommendation system that allows customers to fill out a questionnaire (age, budget, taste taboos and physical condition) in one minute, and the system can quickly recommend a suitable meal series.
• Remarkable results: This change not only significantly reduced the manpower burden of customer service, but also improved the response speed and accuracy, effectively reduced customer complaints, and allowed valuable manpower to focus on more warm and in-depth services.

Looking back on this upgrade process, Zili worked with professional teams such as Shuhuo Brand Consultants and Hongxiang Technology, as well as government resource injections, to enable small and medium-sized enterprises to break through funding and talent constraints and steadily advance the pace of transformation.

3. Google keyword marketing: accurately reach target customer groups

In addition to system optimization, Zili also invested 100,000 yuan (government subsidy of 50,000 yuan) in Google keyword marketing during this transformation.

“Because our services are highly purposeful, we are more concerned about the search function.” Huang Qiman explained: “We hope to attract people who really need postoperative care, cancer care, and recovery from physical weakness, not just a few more orders.”

Through precise keyword placement, Zili expects to achieve revenue growth of more than 20% in the fourth quarter of 2014 compared with the same period in 2013, and the proportion of online orders in total revenue will increase from 40% to 60%.

Repurchase rate is the best answer to unsuccessful transformation

After the brand transformation, the most gratifying thing is that the repurchase rate of old customers has increased steadily. Huang Qiman mentioned: “We have regular customers returning every month. Many of them ordered confinement meals in the past. Now, even when their mothers are sick or their fathers have surgery, they come back to order meals from us.”

Word-of-mouth recommendations are Zili’s most important customer source. “Many of them are introduced by friends. For example, if someone has cancer, if he goes to his friend’s house, they will recommend your meal.” Huang Qiman shared.

Looking to the future: Becoming a long-term partner in family health

From confinement brokers to all-round maintenance experts, this one-stop service model has built a moat that is difficult for competitors to cross. Zili’s transformation journey is full of challenges, but also full of opportunities.

Although the declining birthrate has compressed the maternity and childbirth market, it has also opened up a blue ocean for all-age care. Taiwan is rapidly entering an aging society, and the demand for post-surgery care, recovery from physical weakness, and care for silver hair will only increase.

“We hope that from the stage of boyfriend and girlfriend, they can experience it first, then when they get married and order confinement meals, and later when the elders in the family need care, they will think of us.” Huang Qiman described Zili’s vision: “I think this is a line of connection, and the brand impression is always superimposed.”

More importantly, Zili not only sells meals and services, but also takes care of the physical, mental and spiritual health of a family. From the marriage saved by the experience center to the body taken care of by the nursing home, Zili plays the role of a promoter of happiness for the new family.

“Meticulous care at every critical moment.” This is not just a slogan, but also Zili’s commitment and persistence to the maternity care profession for 20 years.

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Further reading

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• From Standard Chartered Building Cafe to AI Net-Zero Promoter: How does Taichuang Digital turn lunch box ordering into a good business with carbon rights?
• From handwritten notes to AI diversion, how can global pharmacies turn Li Changbo’s human touch into a digital moat?

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