China Snack Archive ·
A Generational Memory Collection
A digital field study of 300 iconic Chinese snacks, tracing the taste memories and brand histories of the 80s, 90s, and 00s generations.
This is a self-initiated digital cultural preservation project. I built a structured archive of 300 Chinese packaged snacks across seven categories — including spicy strips, puffed snacks, candy, jerky, and nuts — with each entry documented by brand origin, production region, discontinuation status, and generational memory tags.
The most demanding aspect was visual archaeology for discontinued products. Snacks like Niuyangpei and Jiajia Milk Candy have been off shelves for decades, requiring sourcing from second-hand platforms, nostalgia communities, and vintage ad archives to reconstruct their packaging. The final product is an interactive exhibition website with filtering by era and category, designed to balance information density with visual warmth.
Background
China's snack market moves fast. Brands that defined entire childhoods disappear quietly, with almost no documentation. This project is an attempt to preserve them in archival form before they're forgotten entirely.
What I Did
I designed a structured data framework for 300 snacks, built around five core fields: product name, brand, region of origin, discontinuation status, and generational tag. I also developed a dedicated sourcing protocol specifically for products no longer on the market.
The Core Challenge
The most interesting part of this project was vintage packaging reconstruction. Current products have accessible official imagery, but discontinued snacks required digging through Xianyu listings, collector forums, and old advertising archives. For the rarest items, I commissioned illustrators to redraw historical packaging from old photographs as vector files.
Final Deliverable
An interactive exhibition page with dual-axis filtering by generation (80s Nostalgia Hall / 90s TV Childhood / 00s Viral Snack Wall) and by category, alongside dedicated archive entries for associated cultural artifacts like Little Raccoon Water Margin trading cards.
