Chinese New Year is on February 10 this year and regular readers of this blog know that Chinese are now preoccupied with buying stuff for the Spring Festival, the official name for Chinese New Year, and most of it will be food and drinks.
I happen to be in China at the moment to celebrate with family and friends, but obviously also to observe the latest trends. I visited Beijing’s annual New Year Fair in the Agricultural Exhibition Centre. In this post, I want to focus on the foreign influences in this year’s fair.
Russia
Russian products are by far the most important foreign foods offered on the fair. Some of them are imported, while others are produced in China, in particular in Harbin. Harbin is the home of the famous lieba, a word derived from the Russian word for bread ‘hljeb’. A big stand from Harbin also offers various Russian style sausages.
In the middle of the fair is a large space set up as a supermarket, with an entrance and an exit with the cashier. It offers a broad range of goods, including some non-food products. I am simply providing a few pictures of milk powder, chocolate, cookies, and pasta.
Australia
Australia is the second nation in terms of volume. I saw three or four stands with Australian food, in particular oatmeal.
New Zealand
There was one stand with products from New Zealand, with wine as the most visible. That was especially interesting considering that no stand offering Australian products was selling wine. A few wines were offered for exceptional low prices (for Chinese standards).
Spain
A stand promoting Spanish ham is positioned near the entrance. Interestingly the same stand is advertising with ‘pizzas with Spanish ham’.
Romania
The Romanian stand was exclusively selling wines from Romania and Moldova. The Romanian importer and his Chinese aide were selling actively, offering free tasting of several wines. On the other hand, the importer was not prepared to give special prices for the New Year, except for a 6-bottle box of the cheaper red wine.
Indonesia
Indonesia was present exclusively with coffee, including the prestigious kopi luwak.
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A longer stay in China offers the opportunity to get to know a wide variety of people. At an organic products market, we met an older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Xiong, who set up a French bakery. Both are retired civil servants, but still work daily in their own bakery, with their son, where they bake authentic European bread and related things.
Bread
Bread is not a traditional product in China. Chinese eat steamed bread (mantou). When European communities began to form in a number of large cities at the end of the 19th century, this also attracted bakers. As a result, bread gradually became known in China, but when the Chinese also started baking bread, it was of a different type than what Europeans like to eat. Chinese bread, like bread in many other Asian countries, has the consistency of cotton wool, is snow-white and quite sweet. It’s more like cake than bread.
Foreigners
Over the course of the nineties and later, foreign communities arose again in the larger Chinese cities. This created a need for firmer bread and bread with more fibre. Western fast food chains and hotels also needed bread, which had to come fresh from a local oven. A number of European entrepreneurs started baking European bread. However, as usual, it didn’t take long for Chinese entrepreneurs to start seeing opportunities in this market as well.
French connection
The history of the business of the Xiong family started, when their son opted to study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. There he got to know all aspects of gastronomy, but chose patisserie as his specialty. His parents came to visit him in Paris and also fell under the spell of French culture in general and gastronomy in particular. That is also so surprising, when you consider that food and drink occupies a central place in both cultures.
Suburb
The Xiongs set up their first bakery in a suburb in eastern Beijing. There was no place for a store there yet. They sold their bread through third parties. It was also still in the hobby stage at the time. When they went on holiday, baking also stopped temporarily. That did make many of their customers grumble. When they had to close that bakery because the local government had other plans with the area, they moved the company to its current location near Beijing’s embassy district. That was a success, as the French embassy is one of Xiong’s regular customers.
Three in one
The bakery, officially called Uncle and Aunt Xiong in Chinese and La Maison de Xiong in French, shares a space with a coffee shop and a bar. The space itself is again part of a co-worker space, a space where small independent entrepreneurs can (co-)work. Upon entering, it feels like you are back in Europe. However, appearances are deceiving. Where Europeans would work together on the basis of strictly agreed rules, the various entrepreneurs there mainly work on the basis of mutual respect and trust. For example, we talked to the Xiongs in the bar for more than an hour, because the bar attracts few customers during the day. We drank coffee from the coffee shop that fitted perfectly with a fresh scones from Xiong.
Product range
The store’s showcase offers a completely different image than that in most bread chains in China. You can buy several types of sturdy brown bread. Most do have extra ingredients such as figs or walnuts, but it has a firm bite and is not so sweet. There is white bread, but also sturdy in structure, available in various shapes. An invention of the Xiongs is soy milk bread, bread made with soy milk instead of cow’s milk or water. It is a successful attempt to make higher protein bread that fits better into the Chinese flavour palette. We didn’t see much patisserie that day apart from two types of scones. You can of course place an order from the brochure and pick it up later in the store or have it delivered to your home.
Enterprising
The Xiongs are now in their seventies, but when you hear them talk about their plans, they seem thirty or more years younger. They start early in the bakery every working day and are not ready until after noon to take it down a bit. In addition, they have also bought a property near the Great Wall that they want to furnish as a holiday home. There, guests can enjoy not only fresh bread, but also other local, organically grown products. The air is cleaner than in Beijing due to its high elevation. All this fits into the increasing interest among Chinese consumers in organic products. There is also a branch in Shunyi, a northeastern suburb of Beijing with much more expensive residential areas.
Next step
The Xiongs want even further. Their concept is well suited for franchising, where others take over the entire concept for a fee, from products to the layout of the store, etc., for a fixed amount per period. A change in management will be required for such a step. First of all, you have to hire an experienced professional manager for this; not necessarily someone who can bake bread, but someone who can lead the staff and supervise the, growing, number of franchisees. It’s not that far yet and the Xiongs are behind the ovens almost early every morning with great pleasure.
An international coffee exhibition was held in Pu’er, Yunnan province, on January 5 – 7. Pu’er is the central town in Yunnan’s coffee production region, that is good for 95% of China’s coffee production; the remainder being produced in Hainan. In 2022, Yunnan’s total coffee bean output was 113,600 mt That year, Yunnan exported 8,700 mt of beans.
International
In that respect, Pu’er is the natural venue for an international coffee fair in China. However, the town is not the easiest place to reach for international exhibitors or buyers. That was probably the reason that, although it was an international fair, the number of foreign stands was limited. Only the stands of Mexico and Uganda had foreign persons on the stand. The other non-Chinese stands were manned by local people. As for visitors, I only spotted one other foreign visitor apart from myself.
Exhibitors
As Eurasia Consult specialises in food and beverage, I will not allot space in this post on machinery or services. However, the number of exhibitors was remarkably high. It seems that we can divide Chinese suppliers of coffee in two types: coffee companies comparable to the big international suppliers and a large number of small companies. The former purchase beans from farmers and process it into a number of standardised products. The latter are farms that have started processing their own beans into specialty products, and/or have added tourist facilities like a visitor centre or even a hotel, so tourists can stay at the farm for a complete coffee experience.
Coffee
A visit to a coffee fair inevitably leads to a high caffein intake. At a certain moment, it becomes hard to savour the flavour of another cup offered to you however hospitably. Still, the average quality was good. The range of flavours was impressive. Chinese coffee processors have reached the level of maturity in which various houses have developed a distinct flavour that you can like or dislike as a consumer. Most people offering coffee at the stands were familiar with expressions like ‘dark roast’ vs ‘medium roast’. Also, most coffee offered was prepared freshly in a percolator, to extract maximum flavour.
Innovative products
Coffee (beans, grinds, instant) was not the only product exhibited at this fair. A number of exhibitors was offering a broad range of derived products:
Ice wine is originally a German product. Due to global warming, Germany has now been overthrown by Canada as the largest producer. Interest in iced wine is growing worldwide and, as usual, this quickly arouses the interest of Chinese entrepreneurs. I tasted ice wine at a producer in Yunnan province in December 2023.
Ice wine
Ice wine was actually discovered by chance. When you expose grapes to frost for a few nights before harvesting, the fruits dry out. As a result, the sugar content becomes higher. In addition, this delayed harvest also gives free rein to fungi that feed on the sugars and convert them into aromatic substances. That combination of concentration and mould gives the juice and the wine that is made from it the typical aroma of ice wine. Ice wine can be made from different white grapes, but in Canada the Vidal grape is the favourite.
Weixi
A Beijing entrepreneur, a New Zealand winemaker and the local government of Weixi Prefecture in Yunnan Province imported and planted stock of the vidal grape from Canada in Weixi in 2009. This location has been selected as the most suitable for this grape after a long comparative study. The area is located in the subtropical zone, but at 2300 meters above sea level, so that warm sunny days alternate with cold nights, many with sub-zero temperatures, ideal for the production of ice wine.
Grapes
Upon arrival at a local guest house in Tacheng, a village in the Weixi region, we left for the winery located higher on the mountain. From the car we saw fields of vines on both sides of the car. Most of that village’s farmers bred grapes. The grapes were still hanging on the sticks, even though it was already at the end of December, but did not make an attractive impression at first glance. They were shrivelled and closer we also saw white fungal threads. Then arrived at the company.
Lapu Valley
It turned out to be a state-of-the-art winery. From the outside it didn’t seem too big, but on the way to the office we saw a hall with shiny stainless steel fermenters and storage vessels; according to the manager imported from Italy. The company is built against a slope so that it is a lot deeper than it seems from the outside. The company is called Lapu Valley Winery, named after the Tibetan name of the river that flows through the valley. Of course, it has also been noted that many wines from countries such as Chile or Australia are called XX Valley. Farmers in the area who have switched to grape cultivation deliver their produce to Lapu Valley, which makes wine from it in a modern way.
Three products
In a special tasting hall we were presented with three wines, as usual in order of intensity: dry, semi-dry and sweet. The dry wine is not the biggest product, but it is the most special. Sweet wines are the usual product made from the Vidal grape. As far as I know, Lapu Valley is the only winery that also produces dry wine from it. The dry wine is remarkably light in taste, but still retains the typical aromas of the Vidal grape. The semi-dry wine is less special, but according to the manager it is most appreciated by Chinese guests. It fits well with a Chinese meal that typically consists of several dishes, which you eat simultaneously. Personally, as a European, I would prefer the dry version. The ice wine is a true revelation. As far as I’m concerned, this one compares with the top brands.
Small volume
It is unlikely that we will see Lapu Valley wines for sale in outside China any time soon. The production is still too small to think of international promotion. They have already won a bronze medal in China. A number of Western restaurants in major cities like Shanghai have purchased wine from Lapu Valley and there is also a buyer in Hong Kong. In order to produce more income, the company also sells its bottling and packaging capacity to other companies. During our visit we saw that the employees were busy bottling a red wine imported in large barrels for a trading house elsewhere in the region.
Peverelli on Chinese food and culture 