The Rise of Slow Food Movement in China

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

The news about China in the Western media is dominated by stories of rapid growth and lightening-speed developments. When you return to China after you last visit, that was half a month ago, you will already notice changes, in particular in the country’s first and second tier cities.

This has not been a totally positive development and that is especially evident in the food industry. Plagued by food safety incidents, Chinese consumers, many of whom change cell phones every half year, to keep up with the latest fashion, are getting nostalgic for the days that all food was safe to eat, that you could only buy fresh fruits and vegetables of the season.

In a previous post, I have collated a number of reports on Community Supported Agriculture in China. This week’s post is a continuation of this theme, focussing on Slow Food.

Slow down, Shanghai

In recent decades, speed has been the name of the game in Shanghai, whether for business, buildings, fashion and food. At the launch of Slow Food Shanghai in December 2011, through presentations from more than 20 farms, restaurants and producers, it was clear Shanghai is increasingly making sustainability a priority.

In some ways, the metropolis is starting to see things slow down. ‘When I was in school, my teacher told me, ‘We have a big country, and we can’t waste things,’‘ recalls Frank Wang, the training manager for all chefs at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai.

Once again, however, Wang sees people starting to save resources. In his classes, he teaches students to use resources very carefully. For example, cooks can save parts of ingredients that don’t look good or are too tough to the touch for use in stocks. ‘Whether Chinese or Western cooking, this is common in both,’ he says.

Fang Chao, the chef at Le Sheng, a contemporary Shanghai restaurant that opened in November 2011, said he is considering his cooking approach more than he did 10 years ago. He has become concerned about the conservation of wildlife, and though it is common to sell shark’s fin in a restaurant serving a traditional Shanghai menu, he and David Laris, the chef behind the concept, have eliminated the dish from their menus. Fang tries to produce food that feels ‘lighter, cleaner and in some cases, a bit more delicate,’ while keeping dishes and flavors authentic. He cuts back on oil, salt and sugar, even though these are ingredients that have long-defined the local cuisine.

Vegetarian alternatives, like fake gluten-based crab meat or the rarely-seen vegetarian dumplings, are included on the menu. Braised crab meat and fish belly, a traditional dish, has been re-imagined. The original cooking method called for soaking the ingredients in oil followed by low-temperature frying. ‘I now prefer to soak [them] in water to avoid this dish being too greasy,’ he said.

At the Grand Hyatt, Wang trains staff to be frugal and conservative with energy and materials. ‘If they leave the kitchen, they need to turn off the light, the fire, the water,’ he said.

For the most part, these chefs believe the sudden flood of attention on green food in Shanghai is a response to food safety scares in recent years. ‘This made the average person more aware and caused more people to at least wonder where the food they are eating may come from,’ Fang said.

After the Slow Food Shanghai chapter was organized, initial research showed that the majority of focus group respondents agreed that they would make a real effort to obtain good, clean and fair food. As Chinese disposable incomes increase along with these trends, people are willing to spend more money being picky with what they consume.

China’s globalization has exposed its citizens to concepts already popular in other parts of the world. These chefs work in cosmopolitan environments and are exposed to the growing awareness of sustainability.

Restaurant Kush aims to use this experience as an opportunity for cross-cultural exchange and helping people understand that we’re all living on this world and must learn to work together. The all-Chinese team tries every new dish that is added to the menu, and even those that are not vegetarian care less about cooking with meat or not.

In a country that has experienced unheard-of upheaval and change in a short period of time, these chefs face the future with open minds. Fang thinks it’s possible to cook classic Chinese dishes in new ways because the idea of what is ‘classic’ is also always evolving.

Fast food notion under attack

Pushing for more sustainable, healthy, organic food, and pushing away from an imported, urban fast-food culture is not easy in Beijing.

But recently, three events have at least signalled the start of the movement: The setting up of the Beijing chapter of Slow Food, the commemoration of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Day and the inclusion of a ‘Best Sustainable Restaurant’ category in city guide magazine Time Out Beijing‘s annual food awards.

Kerstin Bergmann, a co-leader of the Slow Food Convivium in Beijing, says that since milk scandal of 2008, the demand for clean organic food in Beijing has been growing and that more people are interested in what they are putting into their mouths.

Originally from Italy, the Slow Food movement stands for three things – good clean food sold at a fair price for both consumer and producer and a push towards eating local, all of which is finding empathy in China.

Zhang Zhimin, a local legend of organic sustainable food in China, says one of the biggest reasons why she started a farm was her own concern about food safety. ‘I was getting sick from this chemical that was used in produce,’ says Zhang. ‘So I figured I would try to grow some of my own food.’ Zhang started her farm, God’s Grace Garden, in 2001. The original concept was to grow her own food, but she started giving away extra crops to friends and family. Zhang says her friends and family kept prompting her to start selling, telling her she could make money with her vegetables.

Unwilling to convert her project into a business, Zhang decided to turn her farm into a membership co-share model. Members pay monthly dues and get a share of the produce but are required to take an active role in production.

Dannan Hodge, the Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution ambassador in Beijing, also works with the Beijing farmer’s market association. ‘The organic revolution here is in its infancy stage but it’s growing quite quickly. It’s still predominantly marketed to locals, so part of what we’re trying to do here is to bring in farmers and vendors capable of providing an English-speaking service to foreigners.’ The Beijing farmers market association has over 300,000 fans.

The main problem is spreading the message. The proponents of Slow Food all point out that the most important thing in getting people involved is education. In the past, people used to spend 90% of their income on food, but now it’s become 9% on food. When they buy things like cell phones, they are willing to spend. People are willing to pay more when it’s convenient.

To Zhang and Hodge, the most important step moving forward is to continue educating consumers and making them co-producers of their food, holding individuals accountable for what they eat.

Slow and steady, the Chinese way

It is not a strange innovation imported from abroad. It is the natural Chinese way to eat local, eat slow and eat seasonal. What has changed is the recent waves of intra-provincial migration as labor demands and geographical dislocation move people around.

But Chinese chefs are confident that all these will have little impact on the preservation of regional and traditional cuisines.

‘Most Chinese, when they move to work and live in another city, try to locate places where they can get a taste of home,’ says Fu Yang, general manager and executive chef of Le Quai, a Chinese fusion restaurant based in Beijing.

‘In Beijing, for example, there are less and less real ‘local’ Beijingers. But people still look for traditional Beijing foods.’ Fu’s restaurant became a member of the Slow Food Movement in 2004.

He says that while expatriate and foreign customers recognize that status, many Chinese diners do not understand the meaning of the snail logo on the eatery’s facade. He admits, though, that the restaurant’s Slow Food member status has helped create media awareness and good publicity.

Some chefs think the influx of migrants from other provinces help diversify the culinary scene. ‘Restaurants have become increasingly fusion now,’ says Qu Hao, China’s national level cuisine master. ‘In Beijing, for example, there used to be mostly Shandong cuisine, but now there are Sichuan and many other food styles.’

Qu runs a training academy for chefs in China and is schooled in traditional Shandong cuisine, the mother lode for Imperial style dishes. But his experiences include a range of other cuisines, including most of the major culinary styles in China. For example, Qu says, the crisp celery from Shandong’s Majiagou and ‘iron pole’ Chinese yam from Henan province are two vegetables that have caught the attention of chefs in Beijing, and this has helped value and productivity.

Fu says his restaurant buys most ingredients from local producers, and at least a third are organic. ‘Food safety concerns have made me even more determined not to use any dubious ingredients, and trade only with major suppliers,’ says Fu.

At a recent event at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, local gourmet Shu Qiao stressed the importance of preserving heirloom food and produce that face gradual extinction. The media is also playing its part in pushing this awareness.

Qu says the Slow Food Movement may attract a certain target group, but most young Chinese face pressures at work and demands on time. For them, a quick meal is the answer and many eat out instead of taking the time to cook at home. For that reason, the Slow Food Movement as it is interpreted in the West may take longer to establish its foundations here.

Slow Food Festival in Chengdu, September 2017

Chengdu (Sichuan) will host the seventh Slow Food International Congress Meeting this September, expecting to draw the public’s attention to the sustainable food industry and to eating healthily. Lorenzo Berlenghis, vice-president of Slow Food International, said it is the first time the festival, which takes place every four years, has chosen an Asian city for its venue, after careful evaluation. Chinese philosophy says that food is the first essential of human life, and the same rule applies across the world, Berlenghis said. “Slow Food International has always respected the endeavor Chengdu has made in preserving Chinese culinary culture and local ingredients,” he said.

During the event, 600 delegates from over 90 countries and regions, including experts from global enterprises, as well as other leading figures and scholars, will bring their experience to Chengdu, holding mindful conversation and dialogues on slow food and to shed more light into how to push the industry forwards. “Food is a vital part in economic innovation,” said Yin Jianzai, deputy head of Chengdu Commission of Commerce. “We will spare no effort to help the Slow Food International Association to hold this event in Chengdu, and I believe the city will bring new perspectives to the slow food festival.” Yin said at the same time, the city will hold its food and travel festival to give guests a better understanding and experience of the local food and culture.

“I have been to Chengdu twice and I love it very much,” said Huang Yongyue, vice-consul general of the Chinese Consulate General in Milan, Italy. “I remembered when I was there in 1990 and I sat in the tea house with a pot for the whole afternoon. It was really nice.” Huang added that Chengdu has a perfect combination of fast development and a slow lifestyle, and he would love to come back to the city, walk down its streets and try its famous foods. He also wished that Chengdu can play an important role in the Belt and Road Initiative, and lead western China to open up to the rest of the world.

Agreement with China to make way for the red ecolabel

During his current visit to China, Danish Minister for Environment and Food, Esben Lunde Larsen, signed a five-year cooperation agreement in Beijing on control of organic products early May, 2017. The goal of the agreement is to pave the way for the Chinese to recognise the Danish government control and inspection concept. The costs of flying Chinese experts to Denmark and of managing the large numbers of technical certificates are a huge burden on small and medium-sized Danish companies. They represent a barrier to exports to China. However, it is hoped that now that the deal has been signed, Danish organic exports will now meet fewer obstacles. Under the agreement, Denmark and China will also be exchanging knowledge and experience. Furthermore, experts will be training each other’s personnel to establish a mutual understanding of the two countries’ approach to producing organic food products and effective control of organic products to avoid duplicate controls by both Danish and Chinese authorities in the future.

Accelerating new projects

A food tech accelerator hopes to help tackle the new challenges in agriculture in China. Matilda Ho founded of Bits x Bites in Shanghai in 2017. Ho, originally from Taiwan, worked as a consultant for BCG and Ideo on Chinese food projects before launching her own food startup, Yimishiji, in 2015. The startup is an online farmers’ market that connects Shanghai consumers with chemical-free produce delivered by electric bikes.

One as-yet-unnamed startup in the accelerator now is developing noodles and other foods made from silkworm flour. The worms are a byproduct of the silk industry–making a pound of silk can require as many as 3,000 cocoons with insects inside. These are occasionally served in restaurants, but most of them are simply discarded. However, they can also be a healthy source of protein.

Another startup, Frugee, is making cold-pressed, high-pressure pasteurized juice from fruits and vegetables, which it markets as an alternative to eating salad. Chinese prefer prepared food, preferably hot, but at least marinated or pickled, and still find it hard to get used to the Western habit of eating raw vegetables In fact, such juices are currently very popular in Japan, where young busy people seem to drink more vegetables that they eat them. Better to drink vegetables than not getting enough of them. Many Western nutritionist may frown when reading this, but it is a discussion similar to that about public nutrition introduced in another post of this blog.

The third startup, Alesca Life, produces hydroponic farms in shipping containers and the software to run them and is already installing systems in both Beijing and Dubai, focusing first on hotels that want to grow produce for their restaurants. Hydroponic and aeroponic farming is becoming more common in some regions of China, and Ho thinks it will quickly grow–partly because China has to feed around 20% of the world’s population with only 7% of the arable land. Interestingly, this also seems to follow a trend that has started earlier in Japan.

Ho is hoping that as more food tech companies around the world hear about the accelerator, they’ll be interested in bringing their own solutions to China. She also hopes to begin to change the food industry as a whole. Already, major Chinese food companies are visiting the startup each week, exploring ways to start their own food incubators or work on projects in the space. But Ho says that much greater participation is needed.

Slow food in Sichuan

The International Slow Food Movement has signed a partnership agreement with Sichuan University in 2017. It makes a lot of sense for the Movement to use the region of origin of China’s most famous regional cuisine as its foothold in the region. It is the best choice for this type of activity as Sichuan people take food very seriously and eat their meals slowly to increase the time of enjoyment.

1000 ‘Slow Food Villages’ within five years

The head of the China branch of Slow Food International plans for the development of 1000 “Slow Food Villages” across the country over the next five years. “In recent years, China has shifted towards a greener, environmental and ecological model of growth so the conditions are now right for us to get more involved in Slow Food,” Sun Qun, secretary general of Slow Food Great China, said after the close of the annual Slow Food International Congress, which was held in Chengdu, capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province, from September 29 to October 1, 2017. As a country, China has been involved in the movement for just two years, but the local branch has big plans for the future. Sun said the concept of the Slow Food Village would be a first for China, and the community of Anren, in Dayi county near Chengdu, had been selected as the pilot for the scheme. Detailed plans for the development of Anren would be released before the end of this year, Sun said.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation.

Ready-to-Drink Coffee in China: A Disruptive Trend

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

Coffee has been reported on before in my post on Pu’er. People have been talking about the Chinese market for ready to drink coffee a lot since then. Apparently it is a topic that is on people’s minds, so I have bundled their remarks in this dedicated post.

Coffee vs tea beverages

The following table shows the turnover of tea beverages and coffee beverages in China in the period 2019 – 2024, also indicating the ratio between the two. It is clear that coffee is slowly but definitely winning this battle. However, these data also show that the total market of ready-to-drink tea and coffee is growing steadily.

An emerging coffee nation

China is gradually emerging as a coffee producing nation. The country’s current annual production is approximately 100,000 mt, 98% of which takes place in Yunnan, the home province of Pu’er, and the remaining the island province of Hainan.

By the end of 2010, China had 135 coffee processing companies, the geographic distribution of which is can be found in the following table.

Region	companies
Shanghai	37
Guangdong	26
Yunnan	18
Beijing	17
Hainan	11
Other	26

This shows that the processing still mainly takes place in the most developed regions and not in the locations where the coffee is grown. However, the Pu’er post shows that the main multinational players have set up shop in Yunnan.

The Chinese have never acquired a habit of brewing coffee at home, which creates a fertile ground for two types of products: coffee shops where you can enjoy your favourite brew (see my post on that market), and Ready To Drink (RTD) coffee products, introduced in this post.

Applying the Chinese instant tea model to instant coffee

Between 2008 and 2013, instant tea has been the driving force in the Chinese tea market, increasing sales by USD 1.7 billion. To date, the popularity of instant tea is almost entirely a Chinese phenomenon, as China accounted for 92% of Asia-Pacific’s instant tea sales in 2013. Instant coffee on the other hand, is immensely popular throughout the region, with China accounting for just 15% of the overall market in 2013. As instant coffee shares many of the attributes that have driven the success of instant tea in China, namely the replication of foodservice options, flavour malleability, convenience, and a young consumer base, applying the innovative packaging of instant tea to coffee may spell further success for Asia’s already booming instant coffee market.

Instant tea in China is composed almost entirely of instant ‘milk teas’ that aim to replicate the sweet flavours of popular street stall/kiosk and café operators like Happy Lemon, Jack Hut, and ChaTime. Popular flavours include red bean and jasmine green, while some also include bobas (tapioca pearls found in bubble tea) for added texture. To make the beverage accessible through retail channels, manufacturers use single-serve packaging of on-the-go paper cups filled with a sealed pouch of instant tea and a straw.

The sweet flavour profile of these milk teas, and economical price tag compared to their on-trade equivalents, makes them particularly popular with younger Chinese consumers. The accessible format and price of instant tea enables young consumers to partake, albeit indirectly, in fashionable foodservice.

Aware of the influence of younger demographics, Chinese manufacturers including the Guangdong Strong and Zhejiang Xiangpiaopiao (2023 turnover: RMB 362.5 billion) are deliberate in their marketing, positioning the products specifically to Chinese youth, through fun packaging, and celebrity endorsements. Xiangpiaopiao is awaiting approval for its IPO before the end of 2015.

Is China the future for instant coffee?

In the past decade, the instant coffee market has actually expanded at rates of 7 to 10% a year, according to the Global Coffee Report; the International Coffee Organization projects a 4% global volume growth between 2012 and 2017.

The country that historically drank about two cups of coffee per year per person is now the fourth-largest global market for ready to drink coffee in terms of volume. The reason? Convenience. A 2012 poll found that 70% of Chinese workers said they were overworked and more than 40% stated they had less leisure time than previous years. Plus, most new buyers are used to boiling water to make tea, often owning just a teapot and not the appliances needed to make a fresh pot of coffee. By 2017, the Chinese RTD coffee market is projected to increase by 129% in volume. A recent study estimates that the value of the Chinese RTD coffee market will be RMB 18.6 bln by 2020.

Like many food innovations, the origin of instant coffee has several claimants.

Instant coffee is tapping into a new market: tea drinkers. As of 2013 in Great Britain, tea bag sales dropped 17.3% while sales of Nescafé instant coffee went up in supermarkets by more than 6.3%. The country known for it’s tea and crumpets may be making a similar transition to China’s tea-drinking population.

Nestlé SA led the Chinese market with 70.8% share in 2017, followed by Suntory at 4.9%, Uni-President at 3.3%, and Starbucks at 3.1%. Coca-Cola re-entered the category with its Georgia brand. Its marketing has improved the brand image and the product’s visibility. Nestlé’s Nescafé, a strong category leader, hired Chinese actress Angela baby for TV advertisements, which boosted sales. Starbucks and Ting Hsin (PepsiCo’s local distributor and bottler) agreed to jointly produce and distribute RTD coffee. Suntory and Huiyuan also set up a joint venture to market RTD coffee and RTD tea. In 2015, Hui Yuan was the largest local player in off-trade volume sales terms.

In terms of flavor, the most popular one is latte, accounting for over 54% of off-trade volume sales in 2015.

Coffee as ingredient

Europeans still mainly think of coffee as a beverage made by infusing ground coffee beans with boiling water. The real coffee lovers drink it black, hot and bitter. Those who find that a little too intimidating can dilute it with milk. As most Chinese still have a problem with pure coffee, even with the heavily diluted americanos served by Starbucks or Costa Coffee, a number of coffee flavoured beverages have appeared on the Chinese market. The most recent one Maoyuan Coffee by Wahaha (Hangzhou, Zhejiang).

Multinationals follow suit

A recent development in this market is a strategic alliance between Starbucks and Tingyi. Tingyi, a leading food and beverage producer, has signed an agreement with Starbucks to manufacture and distribute the latter’s RTD products on the Chinese mainland. Tingyi is a well-known supplier of instant noodles and biscuits. According to the agreement, Starbucks will help Tingyi, which makes the well-known Master Kong brand of instant noodles, with coffee expertise, brand development and future product innovation. Tingyi will manufacture and sell the Starbucks RTD portfolio in China, said a statement from Starbucks.

But it will take a lot more than a fancy Starbucks product to convince Americans to drink products like this one sold in China: Nestlé’s instant coffee with jelly.

A multinational like Coca Cola cannot afford to miss out on the popularity of tea beverages in China. The company is marketing its RTD coffee brand Georgia in China.

Taiwan-based manufacturer of snack food, Want Want, had already started looking for divesting opportunities in the beverage industry, when it launched its own RTD coffee brand ‘Mr. Bond’ in 2018. When I am writing this (June 2018), it is still too early to judge the success of this product.

Costa has to follow suit

Costa Coffee could not afford to neglect this market and launched a range of ready-to-drink coffee beverages in China late March 2020.

Jingdong Top 5

China’s leading online store Jingdong keeps track of the top selling brands of any product type the platform has on offer. The following list are the 5 best selling ready to drink coffee brands in 2020

Rank	Brand
1	Nestlé
2	Starbucks
3	Nongfu Spring
4	Coca Cola (Costa)
5	Chef Kong

Three of the top 5 are international brands, which indicates that it still is a relatively foreign product group. Nongfu Spring is China’s top bottled water brand, but has been expanding to other types of beverage in recent years. Nongfu launched a new type of RTD coffee, branded Yirgacheffee (Tanbing) in 2022 (see the next photo). Chef Kong is the leading instant noodle brand, but has also diversified into beverages a few years ago.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation.

Urban Farming: A Response to China’s Food Safety Crisis

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

Numerous food safety problems that have occurred and stubbornly re-occurred in China during the past few years. The loss of confidence in the domestic food industry has triggered a number of responses among Chinese consumers. One is growing your own food at home, on your roof or balcony, another is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).

Dispossessed farmers

Before moving to the real CSA, I need to introduced a typical Chinese problem: the issue of dispossessed farmers, i.e. farmers whose land has been repossessed for urban expansion. On the financial side, those farmers are usually well compensated. They are offered modern apartments to live in and allocated jobs that do not require (intensive) educations, like: janitors, cleaners, security guards, etc. However, having been weaned with agriculture, most of the dispossessed farmers long develop nostalgic thoughts about their previous lives. Some of them engage in illegal intra-urban farming, using decorative urban greenery to grow vegetables or even raise small animals like chickens. The number of dispossessed farmers is growing with 2.5 – 3 mln per year. Their number for 2017 is estimated at 70 mln. This type of urban farming is still regarded as illegal in China, but there are considerable regional differences in the extent to which it is tolerated. If used well, these people can become a genuine human resource, a driving force behind Chinese urban agriculture.

Balcony farmers are taking root

With growing wealth, concerns about food safety and the fever for online shopping, more urbanites are taking to farming on their own terms. Zheng Jinran reports in Beijing.

The perfect storm of two major trends in China – online shopping and growing concerns about food safety – has given birth to a generation of urban farmers.

More urban residents, many of whom are young people between the ages of 25 to 35 living in metropolises such as Beijing, are growing vegetables and herbs on their balconies or rented farmland in the suburbs, and turning to Taobao, a major online shopping service provider in China, to start their apartment gardens. Online searches for vegetable seeds at Taobao has increased by 280% over the past year, according to the company.

“That means, every day, more than 6000 people went to online shops at Taobao expecting to buy seeds and tools that can convert their balconies into a small vegetable garden,” says Lu Qi, a public relations officer from Taobao.

Xue Ling, 26, has been planting vegetables on the balcony of her apartment in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, since 2010. “It’s the only way to keep my food, at least the vegetables, clean and safe,” she says.

“Then I found out that many of my friends have realized the importance of eating vegetables. They have been busy planting this year and asked for my help to get tools for them,” says Xue, who opened a shop for vegetable seeds in April because of the demand. “The sales in my shop are much higher than I expected. More than 2000 bags of seeds have been sold since then,” she says. “They plant vegetables not to save money but to guarantee food safety,” Lu says.

A number of food scandals have rocked the nation in recent years, including the discovery that cucumbers were found with contraceptives and another incident where leeks were found filled with toxic pesticides. The latest crop to join the list of tainted foods is the Yantai apple, which were found wrapped in paper bags containing chemicals.

Xu Jian, 36, an urban farmer in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, spent about RMB 1000 in seeds and organic fertilizer on farmland he rented. He paid RMB 3560 to rent the 30-square-meter farmland for two years. But the move did not come without its consequences: His mother moved out of their hometown to help him plant the vegetables.

“Planting vegetables by myself may cost more money than buying them from the market and they might consume extra energy. But the risk of having polluted food is everywhere. I don’t want my 3-year-old daughter to suffer from any of it. It is great fun to plant in the farmland and share the spoils with my colleagues,” he says, adding that every weekend his family drives to the farmland.

Taobao has taken notice of the demand for vegetables. In addition to selling seeds and tools for urban farmers, the major online shopping provider has begun selling fresh vegetables and other organic food like rice on an independent website called agri.taobao.com as of early June.

“About 1000 farms and companies want to join and provide their organic products on this new platform,” Lu says. “But these green products such as fresh vegetables have special requirement in packaging and transporting, so the sales are not large.”

For those urbanites who crave a bigger plot to grow their crops, the website has a bigger plan: Offering farmland for its users to rent. The option should be available in June.

Taobao will soon release rules to regulate land owners and tenants. The website will also soon provide a platform where plots on a farm will be offered for rent.

“But in the initial state, only residents in Hangzhou and Shanghai can enjoy this new service,” Lu says, adding that it could possibly expand to cover all cities in China in the near future.

“More cities will see the free and convenient exchange of extra vegetables or other agricultural products,” he says. “But there are many problems in achieving this goal, including the packaging and we don’t know when it will come to fruition.” Xu’s contract for the farmland he rents will end in December.

“I’ll still rent some land to plant vegetables, but maybe this time I’ll try to do it through the website. I hope it will work to offer me and more people with appropriate land options,” he says.

COVID-19 as a strong stimulus for balcony farming

HomeFarming

It does not come as a surprise that COVID-19 has been a great stimulus for home farming. In the first quarter of 2022, sales of vegetable seeds on Tmall doubled compared with the same period of 2021, according to a report on balcony gardening released by Alibaba.

Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangdong province’s Dongguan are among the top five cities for urban vegetable growers, who are mainly in their 20s and 30s. Coriander, chives, chili peppers and tomatoes are the most popular choices, it added. Lu Zhipeng, who heads Tmall’s flower department, said balcony gardening is now worth tens of billions of RMB. Enthusiasts can go the traditional route of planting seeds with soil and fertilizers, while others opt for automated growing machines. Zhao Haiping, owner of a Tmall seed store, mainly sells fruit and vegetable seeds from Shouguang, Shandong province. Sweet corn and Japanese pumpkin seeds are his bestsellers.

Han Yijun, director of the National Agriculture Research Centre at China Agricultural University, said he used to grow watermelons and scallions on his balcony. However, growing vegetables in balcony gardens is more than just an accomplishment, Han said. It is becoming a lifestyle trend, and one that requires suitable equipment that is easy to use. Zhang Min, who is in her 20s, said she has harvested small tomatoes three times from her balcony garden in Beijing. Red peppers and coriander are regulars in her garden, and she adds them to her dishes when cooking.

Qin Huai, owner of Marseed an online seller of seeds, said most seed orders his store receives are from urban communities. Buyers are usually young mothers or white-collar workers. “Customers prefer leafy vegetables and seeds that produce red fruit,” he said. The hobby also has great social value. “We set up a group chat where growers can share their fruit and suggestions,” Qin said. “A boy from Suzhou, Jiangsu province, shared photos of about 1,500 red fruits produced from the small tomato seed he planted on his balcony.” The Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences has been testing 40 tomato and 30 chili pepper varieties that are sold by Marseed. Twenty varieties sold by the store this spring were developed by the academy.

Statistics published in June 2023 point out that Chinese produce appr. 150 mln mt of fruits and vegetables on their balconies yearly.

Container dweller

In the summer of 2014 Niu Jian and his family moved from the bustling Beijing district of Haidian to the village of Niuhe in Shunyi, a suburban district. Their new home consists of a single-storey arrangement of six 20-foot shipping containers. A 600 watt solar panel hangs on one wall and 300 watt wind turbine spins on the roof.

Niu had the containers made to order, with doors and windows, a power supply and insulation. The 150 square metre space cost him about RMB 300,000 to have built and fitted out and he describes this as a laboratory for sustainable living. Asked why he wanted to spend so much money for a tougher life on the outskirts of Beijing, Niu explains that he wants to spread the idea of a ‘shared community’ – people who want to find a more sustainable life in the smog ridden city.

Niu’s plans started in 2009. As a gardening technician, he advocated the use of vertical greenery and balcony gardens for years and had a real love for plants and greenery. But he found people in Beijing weren’t as keen as he’d hoped, and this led him to re-examine the way people live in cities.

During 2015 this sustainable living laboratory will hold a series of workshops designed to allow participants to experience communal living. People who share the projects values, and have the necessary time and money, will be selected to invest in building small “sharing communities”.

Following nature’s lead on food

No tomatoes in winter. No oolong tea after Tomb Sweeping Day. Do not treat meat as an everyday staple. The initial impression is that she keeps to the stringent regime of a sustainable lifestyle, but Shi Yan says it’s all totally natural – if you live on a farm.

She is probably the best-known advocate of community-supported agriculture in this country, and she is totally committed. They are often referred to in China as ‘weekend farmers‘.

“If you live and feed on the farm, you have more vegetables and grains. And you can only kill a pig once in a while. It cuts down the consumption of meat.”

As for the tea, she says oolong tea before Qingming (Tomb Sweeping Day) is better because pesticides are rarely necessary then.

“Whatever nature dictates, it’s often the best,” the 30-year-old post-doctorate graduates says. She calls herself a “new farmer” and has been preaching the cause for many years in her slow, calm, measured tones.

Shi is on the sustainability lecture circuit, often appearing in a simple linen shift with her hair tied up in a ponytail and wearing sandals that had just trudged through the farm fields. She has been doing this since she came back from six months’ of hard labor on the Earthrise Farm in Minnesota in 2008.

“Once you build up an intimate relation with the land, life is different,” says the city-bred agriculture scientist from Baoding, Hebei province. It was the hands-on experience from dawn to dusk that taught her the CSA concept from the ground. She wrote a book on her return and quickly became a champion of the movement.

Her first project, initiated with her heavyweight graduate program supervisor Wen Tiejun from Renmin University of China, is Dondon Farm in western Beijing. It made its name as a rented plot of land that hires farmers and promises clean, natural produce for customers who order and pay in advance.

It was a success, although the founder says with all modesty “it was because we broke the ground at the right moment, when concern for food safety was extremely high.”

The farm is still thriving after three years but Shi wanted to address the bigger issue – the sustainability of the rural community “where we are determined to live”.

As head of the year-old CSA model farm, Shared Harvest, she recruits land-owning farmers who are willing to work on the land themselves. Shi monitors the farming process, markets the produce to customers who are willing to pay for their vegetables in advance, and shows them around when they visit.

“Having another stakeholder means more transparency, customers can get what they want to know not only from us, but also from different farmers,” she says, “and if there are disagreements, all the better.

“It is the farmers who benefit from the model more than anyone else. Farming should be rewarding enough to let them stay on the land.”

For now, Shared Harvest makes RMB 0.45 for every 500 grams of vegetables sold. It has already cleared the red, and even projects a sizable profit at the end of 2013, when the number of members will exceed 600.

Her hope is that these members will care enough about what they eat to come down to the farms more often and take part in the whole process.

To encourage them, Shi tirelessly updates progress on the plots and posts reports online on her various social network accounts, sharing everything from pop quizzes on botany to the farms’ daily delights and woes to quotes from Mother Teresa.

“They ask me why my photos always look so good. I tell them the photos show the love of the photographer,” she says as she carefully packs bunches of kale into delivery boxes. This is all part of her routine, and she attends to it with the eye of a committed lover.

She highlights the beauty of deformed tomatoes and crooked cucumbers with a dash of humor, arranging them into heart and swan shapes that are posted online with a poetic line or two. That’s attracted about 30,000 fans to her weibo account.

It’s part of her larger plan to educate consumers: That perfect-looking vegetables may not be safe, and that buying from your neighborhood farmer reduces “food miles” and carbon emission. Yolanda, an expectant mother who is a member of Shared Harvest, is definitely a Shi Yan fan.

“Shi has her feet on the ground, but she upholds an ideal at the same time. I admire her for the stamina and her vision for a better future. I trust her. I’ve seen the farm myself and I can let go of all my worries about food,” she says.

Shi current lives, works and has her research base at Mafang village where she has 40 pigs, 2000 chickens, 30 geese and three farms. Her loving husband works with her and more than 20 young colleagues who all affectionately call her “boss”.

“Shi Yan taught me not to lie,” says Chen Li, who is in charge of sales for Shared Harvest. “That’s almost against a salesman’s instinct. But honesty is the core of our business.”

Chen joined the enterprise a year ago because he believed Shi’s initiative is “small and beautiful”, and that “it could only be done by someone who is adamant and innocent at the same time”.

“I marvel at how people are willing to help her because she’s so trustworthy,” he says.

People power

Farmers supported by their communities may be the answer to China’s concern over food safety, efficient land use and the unbalanced distribution of rural-urban demographics. Sun Ye goes out into the countryside to find out if this model will work for the country.

The physical manifestation of the trend is a box of vegetables that appears on the doorstep every week, filled with seasonal produce with an occasional wormhole, but is still warmly welcomed. It is also the chance to meet and get to know the farmer who supplies the box, and the opportunity to bring the children down to the farm to take part in the sowing and the harvesting.

It is the building of a community, one that is prepared to pay a premium up ahead for the assurance that vegetables on the table are grown according to safe practices, are sustainable, seasonal and as far as possible, free from an overload of pesticides. It is a chance to meet and meld with other members of the community who have the same passion and beliefs.

This is what CSA looks like in China, for now. But looking beyond the summer tomatoes and winter cabbages that are purchased even before they are sown, CSA is a new concept that goes against the traditional, or is a return to old systems – depending on how you look at it.

More importantly, it is a trend triggered by rampant food-safety problems thrown up in attempts to adequately feed a growing country of 1.35 billion. Huge waves of urban migration are yet another problem as the younger generations abandon the hard and thankless efforts of cultivation in their villages and head out to the bright lights.

CSA encourages young farmers to go back to the land, and offers them a business model that gives them insurance against fluctuating prices brought on by inclement weather, unpredictable harvests and natural disasters.

CSA involves the communities around the farms, and is a model that has worked with varying success in North America, Australia and New Zealand. In China, CSA is only at its juvenile stages, and it may grow up to be a very different child.

Shared Harvest in suburban Beijing takes its name from a CSA guidebook. It has also become living proof for this farming model since its inception in mid-2012. It is a cooperative that supplies more than 400 members with weekly boxes of green vegetables – all of which have been paid for upfront.

This new initiative has also helped its farmers, by educating them on agricultural methods that are sustainable, with an emphasis on the long-term rather than short-term bounties. For example, the farmers would probably not have given up the use of pesticides on their own.

“It’s simply scary,” says Liu Xiancang, the director of the Liu village co-op that’s responsible for supplying the vegetables that get sent out to Shared Harvest members.

Harvesting the homegrown

City folks are just as concerned about the food they put in their mouths, often more so than rural residents. That’s why many are turning to their tiny balconies for sustenance. Eric Jou reports on a growing trend.

Imagine growing organic lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers all without pesticides and chemicals. Then imagine being able to harvest such vegetables without even leaving home or changing out of your pajamas to go to market. That is the promise of urban farming, of growing fresh produce in limited spaces.

As more and more people migrate from rural China to the cities, many of them wind up living in cities such as Beijing. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, more than 163.36 million people moved from their hometowns to other locations to work in 2012. Such transient psychographics can be both a blessing and a curse, particularly when it comes to food. Urbanites are eager for opportunities to reconnect to nature. And they face many challenges of time and space.

Urban farming is basically about growing produce and food in an environment with limited space, and it is slowly gaining popularity in Chinese cities.

Dannan Hodge, co-founder of urban farming company High Rise Homestead in Beijing, says it is a popular concept with a lot of benefits.

“You know what’s going on with your food, there are no pesticides or herbicides – nothing that will negatively affect your health,” says Hodge. “A lot of farmers who do traditional farming have vegetables they grow for sale and vegetables they grow for their own consumption. They grow them differently because they know the chemicals they use are hazardous.”

High Rise Homestead works to help Beijing residents to “grow their own” at home. They supply products such as frames that train plants to grow upward, kits for growing produce on inclined surfaces and vertically stacked planters. Windowsills and balcony gardens are all in the picture.

Hodge says the most popular plantings on balconies are vegetables because they’re simple to grow, even strawberries, cherry tomatoes and gourds.

“It really does inspire people to eat healthy – you can’t grow a bag of chips,” she says. People – especially children – get excited to see their own food grow, food that they planted and will harvest themselves.

“There is also a health benefit where people are inspired to become more conscious consumers,” she says. High Rise Homestead is working to cut down the supply chain by sourcing materials locally.

Elizabeth Jane Ashforth says the idea of growing food indoors is great. Ashforth is a doctor of marine biology who tried to build her own sustainable system within her apartment in Beijing, and she says growing food indoors can create wonders.

“People in general have lost a connection to where their food comes from and how difficult it is to grow actually,” says Ashforth. “Doing something like this adds a bit of greenery to your home, it just makes you feel connected to the environment and that can only be a good thing.”

American Tim Quijano has recently started giving DIY lessons on setting up aquaponic ecosystems.

Aquaponics is similar to a hydroponic setup where plants are grown in water, except aquaponics introduces fish into the equation.

A simple aquaponics setup involves a fish tank with possibly edible fish, a water pump, a second layer above the tank where the plants are grown and a light source. The fish eat and create waste and the pump siphons the water to the upper layer to fertilize and water the plants. The water then drains back into the lower tank. According to Quijano, some aquaponics setups can support edible fish such as tilapia.

A fellow with the Princeton in Asia organization, Quijano says his main passion is working on environmental issues. Quijano started working on aquaponics during a move from one apartment to another.

“What got me started was that I had this fish tank in my apartment that I moved into this year and I thought how I could do something fun with this,” says Quijano.

“I like having new projects and learning new things. It just hit me one night that I could learn something about aquaponics,” adding that he’s spent “many hours on Youtube researching growing my own food”.

China has a rich history and culture of being self-reliant when it comes to food, says Quijano. Pointing out recent food safety scares and the migration of workers from the countryside to the cities, Quijano says that there is a wealth of agriculture knowledge in Chinese cities.

“I live in a large apartment complex and the grannies that are there, they have set up little makeshift greenhouses with a stick of bamboo and a tarp. There’s so much knowledge and there’s such an appreciation for it.”

Aquaponics newbie Andrew Morrissey attended one of Quijano’s workshops on a whim after seeing an online posting about it.

“I came to see what it was about and whether I could do it at home and grow some tomatoes for the family and make me more useful,” says Morrissey,

“I don’t know about farming but I am never going out and buying vegetables again but if I can get something going and it works. If it can get bigger over time with a bit of experimenting it can be a lot of fun. Maybe I can get some edible fish. It would make the wife very happy.”

Nanjing – an other city

Much of the above refers to Beijing with its high concentration of well educated people and expat inhabitants with a liking for home-grown foods. Nanjing, that has been the capital of China for while, gives in insight in how slighly smaller big cities are doing in this respect.

Nanjing’s urban centre has very little land suitable for urban agriculture. However, there are various attempts at growing food around residential buildings, especially in tiny front yards and on unused land. Balcony and rooftop gardening is found on a few buildings. Nanjing residents seem to use every available square inch in their communities to grow food. Even the narrow riverbanks of the Qinhuan River are planted.

It is common for property management companies in charge of landscaping to forbid residents to grow food in the community. They argue that growing food would destroy the ornamental landscaping and the manure or fertilizer would cause an unpleasant smell. Still, Nanjing residents too say to grow vegetables because they believe vegetables from the market are contaminated with chemicals. Look at these pictures of food growing in a front yard and water spinach the curb of a road.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation.

Traditional vs Modern Chinese Candies Explained

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

China was the world’s second candy exporter in 2019 with a value of USD 910.8 mln (8.6% of the global exports)

I have already mentioned candy in some of my posts, like the huamei candy as an example of how a traditional sweet is used in China as an ingredient for a novel food, a company like Hsu Fu Chi that is one of China’s top biscuit producers, but also makes candy. As most Chinese have a sweet tooth, it is time to dedicate an entire post to the Chinese candy market.

Top 10 candy brands of 2016

Brand	Share (%)
Hsu Fu Chi	17.46
Alpenliebe	6.86
Madajie	5.22
Golden Monkey	4.73
Extra	4.35
Yake	3.77
Wrigley	3.52
Big White Rabbit	3.37
Orion	3.29
Fujiya	3.26

Hsu Fu Chi and Orion also rank among China’s top biscuit brands.

The global top 100 candy companies list for 2023 for the first time included a Chinese company: Shenzhen-based Amos Sweets. It came in at the 95th position, but after several food safety incidents in the past couple of decades, this is an accomplishment worthy for a congratulation.

Top regions

The following table shows the regional breakdown of candy production in China in 2017.

Region	mt
National	33,136,510,000
Fujian	8,081,420,000
Guangdong	6,684,470,000
Hunan	3,002,380,000
Shandong	1,880,940,000
Hubei	1,765,570,000
Henan	1,716,370,000
Shanghai	1,487,180,000
Sichuan	1,352,090,000
Anhui	1,267,100,000
Jiangxi	1,185,240,000
Jiangsu	1,061,970,000
Hebei	928,590,000
Guizhou	599,630,000
Chongqing	482,510,000
Qinghai	460,200,000
Zhejiang	261,020,000
Beijing	259,160,000
Shaanxi	209,500,000
Yunnan	164,630,000
Hainan	99,850,000
Xinjiang	78,870,000
Tianjin	62,500,000
Shanxi	33,800,000
Liaoning	9,040,000
Guangxi	1,440,000
Ningxia	5,60,000
Inner Mongolia	530,000

The first three regions alone are already good for more than half the national output. The regions not included in this table do not produce (significant volumes of) candy. The value of the Chinese candy market is expected to reach RMB 414.8 billion in 2020. The country has produced 1,062,252.2 mt of candy in the first 5 months of 2020; Fujian was the largest region good for 37.44%.

The most typical Chinese candy

Candy is a rather Western thing, but if you want me to identify a ‘traditional’ Chinese candy, my first choice will be dabaitu, ‘Big White Rabbit’ milk candy, produced by Guanshengyuan in Shanghai (est. 1918).

It is a white soft nougat-like candy. Before wrapping, each candy is wrapped in thin edible rice paper. This is meant to prevent the candy from sticking at your fingers and can be eaten along with the rest of the candy. The ingredients as listed on the packaging are:

Edible glutinous rice paper (edible starch, water, glycerin monostearate), liquid maltose, sugar, whole milk powder, butter, additives (gelatin, vanillin), corn starch, syrup, cane sugar, butter, and milk.

Each candy contains 20 calories. Older Chinese still remember Guanshangyuan’s original slogan: Seven White Rabbit candies is equivalent to one cup of milk. It is therefore positioned as a nutritional product. It is still extremely popular. This product alone generated a turnover of RMB 320 mln in 2013. For decades, there was only the original vanilla flavour, but new flavours, like: chocolate, coffee, toffee, peanut, maize, coconut, lychee, strawberry, mango, red bean, yogurt, and fruit have been added. An ‘extra creamy’ variety has also been launched. The latest addition is ‘ice cream flavour’. According to the packaging, the ingredients are:

Liquid maltose, sugar, whole condensed milk, whole milk powder, cream, additives (gelatine, vanillin, food flavours), edible glutinous rice paper (edible starch, water, glycerin monostearate).

The difference with the traditional candy seems to be small, and mainly in the use of flavours.

For more about the White Rabbit brand, see my special post on this topic.

Tradition slowly forgotten (?)

I don’t want to make northerners think that I have a special liking for Shanghai, so I would like to introduce another traditional candy, that is much older, but less well known outside China, that Big White Rabbit creamy candy: crispy shrimp candy.

These are traditionally made by rolling a chunk of hot molten sugar into a thin sheet, covering one side with sesame paste, and rolling it up into a cylinder that is finally cut into candy-sized pieces. It is a traditional treat from North China that has been adapted to industrial production in the course of the 20^th Century. They are being produced up to the present day, but many older consumers find that the flavour and texture of the current shrimp candy do not match that of the tradition product. Perhaps it has something to do with ingredients, but it can also be a matter of nostalgia, the feeling that nothing tastes as it did before.

Wedding candy – a typically Chinese category

A very Chinese type of candy is wedding candy, or as the Chinese put it: ‘happy candy (xitang)’. Handing out candy is part of every Chinese wedding ceremony. Newly weds often bring some to the workplace to hand out to colleagues who have not attended the ceremony. You can use any candy, but candy makers have started identifying wedding candy as a special market segment and have increased R&D efforts to develop special candy with suitable flavours and colours, and packaging, for this special moment in a couple’s life. Insiders estimate the #Chinese market for wedding at RMB 16 bln, with still considerable growth potential.

However, the candy industry indicates that the market for wedding candy has been decreasing since the 2020s.

Foreign markets

Chinese candy is finding its way to foreign market. A good example is Jinli Candy Co Ltd, a candy producer established in 1984 in Huairen county of Shanxi’s Shuozhou city. In 2010, the company began to export its candies to the Netherlands and in 2011, it established a cooperation relationship with the US Disney company. In 2015, it was listed among suppliers for the US-based Wal-Mart, becoming one of the few Chinese candy producers to enter the European and American markets. Over the years, the Jinli Candy Co has sold its middle-high-end candies to over 13 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Russia, Spain, and Belgium. In 2014, the company’s exports reached $1.5 million.

China Candy in international limelight

Ever Maple Flavors and Fragrances Holdings, under control of Kelly Zong, daughter of Wahaha founder and chairman Zong QInghou, has acquire China Candy Holdings in May 2017. The mother company is based in Fujian province and manufactures and sells candies under the Holeywood brand in China, South East Asia, North America, Europe, and internationally. The company’s products include jelly drops candies, aerated candies, hard candies, and chocolate-made products. Rumours about this take over had been around for months. Ms. Zong is also chairman and executive president of Hongsheng Group, beverage producer recording turnover of RMB 5 bln per year. It looks as if she is following her father’s footsteps in building a food and beverage conglomerate, though focused on what Chinese like to refer to as leisure foods and drinks. This move also proves that the Chinese confectionery industry is currently maturing to a global level.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation.

History and Growth of Chinese Chili Cuisine

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

From ‘too hot’ to chili lovers

Chili has seen a remarkable growth in China during the past couple of decades. I still remember my first year in China as a student in 1975. Sure, you could get spicy dishes in some restaurants, but the average Beijing citizen would start crying ‘hot!’, if a dish would include as much as one single tiny peppercorn.

Although chilli peppers were introduced to China in the latter half of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the fruit only really gained popularity during the early years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). It quickly entered the cuisines of a few regions in China, in particular Sichuan and Hunan, but in many other regions spicy food was regarded as exotic. This is why the term for ‘pungency’ as one of the Five Flavours was xin (pungent) rather than la (hot).

During my later terms in China, not much change in that situation occurred, until in the course of the 1980s Sichuan restaurants started to spring up like mushrooms in the Chinese capital. And we are not talking about food with a few chillis, but Chongqing Hotpot, a kind of fondue, but then with a soup that seemingly consists purely of chili, became the favourite of the Beijingers.

Nowadays, restaurants specialising Sichuan and Hunan cuisines can be found all over China and chili in many varieties (dried, paste, oil, etc.) are top items in supermarkets. There are even shops specialising in all types of chilli. Some people have started to speak about a Chili culture (lajiao wenhua). In Chongqing you can even visit the Youjun Chili Museum.

The China Food Industry Association has organized the nation’s first Spicy Industry Conference on September 15, 2020, in Beijing.

Top chili nation

During a recently held forum on chili processing, insiders have stated that China has developed into the world’s largest chili processing region. The total value of the world market for chili is estimated at USD 30 billion, and China is good for one third of this. Sichuan province alone has an annual raw chili output of approximately 1 million mt, with a value of RMB 1 billion. In some Chinese statistics, spicy sauces are referred to as ‘Sichuan sauces’. The province’s chili processing industry has an annual turnover of RMB 2 billion. R&D in new applications for chili and chili derivatives is also growing, developing products for the food, pharmaceutical, cosmetic industries.

Here is a map of China indicating the relative spiciness of the local cuisines.

The following graph shows the development of the Chinese chili paste production from 2014 to 2020 (unit: 10,000 mt).

The leading brands in 2020 were:

Brand	Share (%)
Lao Gan Ma	20.5
Lee Kum Kee	9.7
La Meizi	9.2

Various shapes

Chili is not only consumed as such, fresh or dried. The fruit is processed in numerous products that themselves are used as ingredients in home cooking or industrial foods. The Food Ingredients China (FIC) 2018 trade fair will included 30 exhibitors supplying various chili-derived ingredients, including: capsaicin, capsicum oleoresin, chili powder, and chili food colour.

A special type of hot sensation is caused by the Sichuan pepper (huajiao) that produces a numbing hot sensation in the mouth, caused by the hydroxy-alpha-sanshool it contains. Sichuan pepper is often combined with chili and other peppers in savoury pastes, like the Pixian Douban reported in an earlier post in this blog.

Chili paste

The by far most common form in which chili is consumed is the chili paste. It is a mixture of ground chili and a variety of other ingredients, and can be easily used to spice up dishes or as a dip for foods that could do with some extra flavour like boiled dumplings. China has produced 5.91 ml mt of chili paste in 2018; up 1.82%. Insiders estimate that that market will be worth RMB 40 billion by 2020.

Here is a list of the top 10 Chinese chili pastes.

Laoganma (Old Godmother)

Laoganma is THE success story of the Chinese seasoning industry. Established in 1997 in Guiyang (Guizhou; another leading chili region of China) by a lady who used to sell spicy noodles at a street corner (starting in 1989), it has rapidly grown into China’s top range of chili products. The company also exports worldwide. Watch this video reporting on Laoganma and its founder.

Laoganma has a facebook group called ‘The lao gan ma appreciation society‘, and is sold on Amazon, and many more online platforms all over the world.

According to the 2025 Top 100 Enterprises in Guizhou, condiment maker Guiyang Nanming Laoganma Special Flavour Foodstuffs Co, producing 3 million bottles of the Lao Gan Ma chili sauce daily, posted revenue of RMB 5.39 billion in 2024, up slightly from RMB 5.38 billion in 2023. This was the third consecutive year of growth, bringing it close to its 2020 revenue peak of RMB 5.4 billion.

A group of young Chinese cocktail makers have started experimenting with cocktails made with Chinese spirits (baijiu) and various hot seasonings including Laoganma. The company has also started a fashionable merchandizing campaign late 2018.

Moreover, Laoganma also started diversifying in other condiments. It launched a type of furu (fermented bean curd) of its own in the early 2020s.

Huaqiao

This brand has a history of more than 300 years, deeply rooted in its home town Guilin (Guangxi).

Lameizi (Hot Sister)

This is once more a new brand, established in 1998 in a traditional chili region: Hunan. It is part of a conglomerate that produces a wide range of foods, besides seasoning products.

Lee Kum Kee

I have reported on Lee Kum Kee before, in my post on yuxiang flavours. The brand dates from 1888 and has its home in Nanshui (Guangdong). It is the best known seasoning brand in East and Southeast Asia.

Meile

This is the first Sichuan brand in this list. The brand covers a wide range of seasoning products, but its Fragrant Spicy Sauce has brought the brand fame.

Huhu

This brand has been established in Qingdao (Shandong), one of China’s blander cuisines, in 1992. It specialises in fermented savoury pastes.

Modocom

This is an English rendering of the Chinese brand name Maodegong. It has been established by a farmer from Leizhou (Guangdong).

Huangdenglong (Yellow Lantern)

This brand was launched in Hainan in 1994. Its name has been inspired by a latern-shaped chili that only grows in Hainan.

Fansaoguang (All Food Devoured)

This is a brand of Gaofuji Food (Sichuan). The name refers to the Chinese perception that chili paste increases the appetite. There will be no leftover of food spiced up with this product.

Haitian

Haitian is one of China’s top seasoning brands. It is currently China’s top producer of soy sauce, but its other products are popular. It is another brand with more that 300 years of history, based in Foshan (Guangdong).

Hot and cold: chili-flavoured ice cream

The latest vogue in the Chinese chili culture is the appearance of chili-flavoured ice cream. It was launched, and we are not surprised, in Sichuan’s capital Chengdu; in the high-end Chunxi shopping district to be precise. Chili is added in the shape of chili oil.

The reaction among consumers are mixed, but it seems that this product is there to stay.

Clean chili sauce

Concepts like Clean Label have also reached China and started to get serious around 2022. However, the Chinese interpretation of ‘clean’ seems to be broader or lest strict than the Western. Here is an example of a chili sauce from Eurasia Consult’s database that is advertised as ‘zero additives’ site in China.

Product: Wangjiadu beef chili sauce

Ingredients:

Rape seed oil, fermented bean sauce (chili, broad beans, salt, water, wheat flour), chili, beef, ginger, carrots, peanuts, douchi (soy beans, water, salt, wheat flour), white sesame, maize, spices, flavours.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation.

China’s Growing Olive Oil Market: An Analysis

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

In the 2025/2026 crop year, China’s olive oil consumption reached 53,000 mt; up 28%.

Healthy image

International olive oil producers are looking at China to increase their turnover, because the nation appears to have developed a taste for the healthy oil.

An telling story from the media is that of Cui Ronghua, a peanut exporter from the eastern port of Qingdao. His children were already drinking imported baby formula, so he decided that the family started cooking with imported olive oil as well.

Olive oil as an ingredient can give a high-end touch to a generic product. Zhongjing Food (Nanyang, Henan) was already famous for its shiitake sauce. The company recently added a ‘luxury’ version to its range of sauces by using olive oil as an ingredient.

Relying on imports

Because China’s climate is not suitable for mass olive production and more Chinese are realizing olive oil is generally healthier than most cooking oils, imports have surged in recent years, especially in top-tier cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, where 80% of olive oil shipped from Spain, Italy, Australia and Turkey is consumed.

Spain is the leading exporter to China. 10,141 mt of Spanish olive oil was imported by China during the first quarter of 2019, 88.4% of the total imports of that period. China imported 37567.96 mt of olive oil in all 2019; up 33%.

Jean-Louis Barjol, executive director of the Madrid-based International Olive Council, the world’s only international intergovernmental organization in the field of olive oil and table olives, said because China’s huge middle class is very conscious about food quality and health issues, the Mediterranean diet, which uses plenty of olive oil, is a practical way to maintain health.

“The numerous television advertisements released recently by Chinese olive oil importers and the campaigns led by export countries’ trade-promotion bodies to explain the uses of olive oil have resulted in a significant increase in sales, as well as the opening of hypermarkets in the nation’s main cities selling imported foods,” Barjol said.

“We found people in China are more inclined to buy extra-virgin olive oil, which does not require refining and is 20% more costly than refined olive oil,” said Amparo Chozaz, assistant managing director of the Spanish Olive Oil Exporters Association in Madrid.

Eager to gain more market share from their already established rivals from Italy and Greece in the China market, Spanish olive oil companies chose to join together in promoting their products under the name Spanish olive oil in the China market.

Chozaz said they spent 4.5 million euros ($6.19 million) on popular cooking programs featuring Spanish olive oil on Chinese TV stations, commercial websites and magazines. They also held national food events to boost their olive oil exports to China in 2013.

Despite the fact that olive oil accounts for only 1% of China’s total edible oil consumption, the country’s olive oil imports remained strong and hit 43,400 mt in 2013, an increase of 5.8% from the previous year.

China’s recent embrace of olive oil was a welcome change for Mediterranean nations, where olive oil prices plummeted in 2012 because of the weak EU economy and a bumper Spanish crop. China’s growing imports have helped support global olive oil prices.

The following table shows China’s imports of olive oil in the past few years.

Year	Imports(mt)
2009	14,700
2010	20,200
2011	32,800
2012	41,000
2013	43,400

Outbound investment

The growing trade figure has also pushed Chinese companies to seek takeover targets overseas that can help meet demand for olive oil back home.

In 2012, six investors from China’s textile, garment and agribusiness industries secured a $15.47 million deal for the purchase of the olive oil company Kailis Organic Olive Groves, which owned 3,813 hectares of plantations in Western Australia.

Another major deal was sealed by Jiangxi Qinglong Group, which invested $32 million in Australia to purchase 5,000 hectares of olive plantations last year, as well as half of the shares in Tatiara Olive Processing Pty, a major olive oil processing company in Keith, South Australia.

The Chinese company intends to invest another $12 million to purchase new equipment and build needed infrastructure to ensure future production. This project is expected to produce 25,716 metric tons of extra virgin olive oil after 15 years and achieve sales revenue of $157 million by then. Both Australia and China will be its main target markets.

Shanghai-based Bright Food Group has bought a majority stake in Italian olive oil producer Salov Group, the company announced on Oct.7, 2014.

Shanghai Yimin No 1 Food Factory, a subsidiary of Bright Food, signed the deal with the Fontana family in Milan on Oct 1, according to a statement published on the buyer’s website.

Bright Food is a big name in dairy industry as well as categories of rice, pork and vegetable in China. It now has four listed subsidiaries.

In the online statement, Bright Food promised to stick to Salov’s values and missions and help promote its development in China.

Salov operates mainly in olive oil and other vegetable cooking oil. It distributes products under the Sagra brand name in Italy and Filippo Berio in overseas markets.

The oil maker currently markets its products in over 60 countries including China and maintains a leading position in Britain and the United States.

Domestic production

In spite of the adverse geographic conditions, a number of Chinese companies have invested in growing olives to take a part of this growing market with domestic products.

Tianyuan in Sichuan started planting olives in 1974 as part of State sponsored project. The company produces cooking oil and olive oil based cosmetics. Tianyuan cooperates with Chengdu University for its R&D.

Garden City (the Chinese name is also pronounced Tianyuan, but with different characters) in Gansu is another domestic producer, established in 1998. It produces olive oil, cosmetics and olive leaf extracts.

Another Gansu-based producer, Longcui is advertising its olive oil as a high-end product with three types of certifications: Gansu Specialty, DOC and Organic.

China currently has 29 producers of olive oil with a total capacity exceeding 50,000 mt p.a. The amount of land devoted to olive growing was reported to amount to 86,000 hectares. Domestic production covers about 12% of the country’s current needs.

Blockchain

OliveTimes

Gansu-based Olive Times has started working closely with VeChain to roll-out traceability across itsentire Special-Olive product line using VeChain’s Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform.

Exhibitions

The 16^th China International High End Edible Oil & Olive Oil Beijing Expo 2017 was held in the China International Exhibition Centre, Beijing, April 17 – 19; the Shanghai International Exhibition Centre, August 30 – September 1; the Chengdu New International Exhibition Centre, October 12 -14.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation.

Harbin’s Unique Culinary Heritage

Posted on October 5, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

It is about time to highlight another region in this blog. After Pu’er in China’s southernmost province Yunnan, I am taking you to the opposite in this blog, to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, which shares a large border with Russia’s Siberia.

What Harbin has in common with Pu’er is that it is not a purely ethnic Chinese city. The name Harbin already betrays that it is not Chinese. A number of stories about the name’s original meaning; one is that it means ‘place to hang fishing nets to dry’ in Manchu, the language of the people with the same name. The Manchus were once a powerful nation, and the emperors of the last imperial dynasty of China, the Qing Dynasty (1622-1912) were Manchus, not Chinese.

Moscow of the orient

After the Russian Revolution, a large number of Russians fled to Manchuria, with Harbin as their unofficial capital. It gave Harbin its nickname ‘Moscow of the East’. A number of Russian buildings still survive, like the orthodox cathedral. Moreover, some Russian words entered the local dialect. The most famous one is lieba, from the Russian chljeb ‘bread’. It refers to a large round bread baked with beer yeast. This type of bread has become the symbol of Harbin cuisine.

Watch this video for more information about the Russian influence on Harbin cuisine.

When the Japanese invaded Manchuria, they more or less let the Russians live there in peace, while the Russians accepted Japanese rule; they had no choice. In fact, for a short period, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and several national minorities (in particular Manchus and Mongolians) lived in a peaceful coexistence in Harbin. This ethnic diversity has created an equally diverse local cuisine. Besides the afore mentioned bread, dairy products also became part of the diet of Harbin people, long before Chinese elsewhere started to appreciate the white gold. The potato, the typical staple of Western cuisine, has also grown roots in this city.

The consumption of coffee is also increasing rapidly in Harbin. Insiders report that there were more than 400 coffee shops in the city at the end of 2015, consuming about 60 mt of coffee beans per year. The Russian Coffee brand Lebo noticed this trend and undoubtedly also cashing in on Harbin’s Russian past, opened its first coffee shop in China in that city in 2021.

Harbin Beer (better known as Hapi in China) is one of the top beer brands in China, though currently owned by Anheuser-Busch. The Harbin municipal government and Harbin Cultural Tourism Group are co-hosting the 2016 China-Harbin International Beer Festival, which will run from June 30th to July 17th at the Harbin Frozen World in Songbei district. There will be 11 beer tents, 16 food exhibition areas and four cultural exhibition areas. The total area of the beer festival is 600 thousand square meters

Agricultural region

Heilongjiang is one of the prime agricultural regions of China. The chernozem soil in Harbin, called “black earth” (Heilongjiang literally means: ‘Black Dragon River’) is one of the most nutrient rich in all of China, making it valuable for cultivating food crops. According to the municipal statistics of 2013, Harbin alone was good for more than 2% of the national grain output, 1% of the meat and 4% of dairy products.

A recent survey comparing the GDP of major Chinese cities with that of nations, revealed that the economy of Harbin can be roughly compared to that of Bulgaria.

Heilongjiang is one of the major grain-producing areas in China, ensuring food security for the country. The grain output of the province reached 67.6 billion kgs in 2014, leading the country’s provinces since 2011 and accounting for one-tenth of the national total.

In recent years, the province has pushed forward agricultural modernization, promoted the green food industry and established marketing platforms for Internet Plus agriculture.

A sophisticated Internet Plus marketing platform has been established for rice products in the province. Heilongjiang rice is of high quality but used to sell poorly.

The following table shows the development of the total turnover of the Harbin food industry during the past few years.

Year	Turnover(RMB bln)
2008	40
2010	50
2011	70
2012	90
2013	95

The processing of agricultural produce was still the most prominent activity in the Harbin food industry in 2013, as is shown in the following breakdown.

Activity	ratio (%)
Processing of primary produce	68.0
Food production	15.3
Beverage production	8.6
Tobacco products	8.1

(tobacco is part of the food industry in Chinese statistics)

Top companies

Wondersun Dairy Industry Co., Ltd.

Wondersun is part of Heilongjiang’s biggest Agricultural State Owned Enterprise called Beidahuang Group. The company is ranked as fifth among China’s dairy enterprises and holds 7 subsidiary companies and 41 factories. Wondersun’s liquid milk ranks among the top ten in the country and was assessed as one of China’s most valuable brands in 2003. The company has formed a strong sales network that covers the whole country. Wang Jinghai, president of Wondersun, believes Heilongjiang is ideal for raising cows and producing dairy. The company is expected to sell products worth RMB 50 mln in 2015 through e-commerce channels and has set a sales goal of RMB 300 mln next year.

Heilongjiang Dairy Group Co., Ltd.

Heilongjiang Dairy Group was established in 2004, and the companies registered capital is 213 million RMB. It is one of the key national enterprises in the agricultural industry in China. The main shareholder is the Haerbin HIT group with 10 other small shareholders. The company has four brands, and the brand Longdan and Jinxing have a high reputation in the entire country.

Beidahuang Group

Beidahuang has 16 agriculture branch companies and Haolianghe Fertilizer Company. It is also the parent of Beidahuang Grains Co., Ltd., and Harbin Longken Malt Co., Ltd.. The company owns 624,000 hectares of land. The main crops are rice, soybeans, corns, wheat and brewing barley, supplemented with crops cash crops like red beans, kidney beans, pumpkin seeds, lucerne, medicinal herbs and flax. Haolianghe Fertilizer Co., Ltd. has an annual production of 200,000 mt of carbamide and other fertilizer products. Beidahuang Grains Co., Ltd. has an annual production of 1.4 million tons of refined rice and 100,000 mt of other byproducts. The yearly malt output of Harbin Longken Malt Co., Ltd. is 200,000 mt.

Harbin as gateway to China

Harbin has been on the radar of foreign investors from the beginning of China’s economic reforms.

Nestlé was one of the first Western multinationals to invest in China, with a joint venture for the production of infant formulae in Acheng, a suburb of Harbin in the 1980’s. This subsidiary of Nestlé has withstood all turbulent developments of China since then.

Another multinational, McCain, started a potato processing venture in Harbin in 2005. The venture included a 7.5 ton/hour plant and two associated potato storage facilities. McCain Foods has been preparing for its expansion in China for a long time before it finally chose Harbin. The company stated that Heilongjiang Province produces the largest output of potatoes yearly. With its unique geological position adjacent to Russia, Harbin may prove an ideal investment location for companies who want to tap the Far East market, he said. The company decided to double its capacity in 2012.

Other foreign investors in Harbin include a yeast plant of Burns Philp. That makes sense, as bread has been part of the local cuisine for a long time. Even thought lieba is a kind of sourdough, yeast bread was easily adopted as a quicker alternative for the traditional Russian style bread. I myself have organized a number of baking seminars, when I was promoting yeast and bread improvers of Gist-brocades (now part of DSM) in China.

China has reacted quickly to cash in on the opportunities created by the trade war between Russia and the EU/US. This will be an extra large boost to the importance of Harbin as China’s northernmost foreign trade hub for food and agricultural products. Harbin’s ‘Russian’ background will certainly facilitate this development. The China Harbin International Economic and Trade Fair was renamed into Sino-Russian Expo in 2014.

The World Dairy Expo & Summit will be organised again in Harbin, april 21 – 24, 2016. The 2015 edition attracted 15,728 visitors from all over the world.

Organic and green food

Heilongjiang is China’s primary region for organic agriculture and Harbin is again a centre for this industry.

The municipal government has build a large modern food storage and distribution system for organic produce. The system includes a food logistics centre with an annual handling capacity of more than 1 mln mt, three distribution centres with a combined annual handling capacity of 1.5 mln mt and 11 grain depots each with a storage capacity of 200 000 mt.

McDonald’s sources the rice it uses on the mainland from Harbin. The city grows some of China’s top-quality rice. It has more than 600,000 hectares of paddy field producing 3.25 mln mt of rice a year as well as some 200,000 hectares of soybeans, none of it genetically engineered. It is not necessarily organic rice, but at least is produced according to China’s ‘green’ specifications.

Harbin also has annual corn output of more than 10 mln mt. The hybrid breed contains three times more protein than common breeds.

In addition to farming, the city government also invests in livestock breeding and processing. It has nearly 500,000 cows, 3 mln beef cattle and 11 mln pigs, and produces 880,000 mt of meat, 365,000 mt of eggs and 1.5 mln mt of milk a year.

The first flagship store for green food from Heilongjiang opened in Hong Kong in February 2014 offering more than 200 products. Of the 64 suppliers, 27 were based in Harbin.

Agreeable culture

Harbin is an interesting alternative to for international investors in the Chinese food and beverage industry. On top of the advantages introduced above, the people of China’s Northeast are known as easygoing and honest. The good people of Harbin are outstanding hosts, entertaining their guests with supersize dishes of fish and meat, to be washed down with lots of baijiu, traditional Chinese spirits.

It may take a little longer to negotiate a deal. They take their time to get to know you and do not feel the urge to put on a business-like act when dealing with foreigners, as you often see in other parts of China. However, once the believe they have figured you out and the impression is positive, you are in.

Mulan – a food production centre in ‘greater Harbin’

The county of Mulan, in Harbin’s northeast, is an important site on the Silk Road Economic Belt. Its connection with Harbin has been strengthened by the completion of the Mulan-Songhuajiang Bridge.

Mulan has a population of 280,000 and covers an area of 3600 square meters. It administers six towns and eighty-six villages. There are thirty reservoirs along the Songhua River in the county and the forest coverage rate is nearly 50%. Mulan has been awarded various titles, such as “National Ecological Agricultural County”, “National Green Rice Production Base” and “National Rural Tourism Demonstration County”.

Mulan is also known for its, rice, coffee and beer. Located in the black soil area of northeast China, it enjoys distinct seasons, adequate sunlight and moderate rainfall, which contributes to the excellent quality of its crops. Hundreds of kinds of precious herbs grow in the 670,000 hectare forest and the abundant grassland feeds flocks and herds. With the improvement of agricultural infrastructure, Mulan has seen remarkable progress, especially in rice and red meat processing.

With the support of related policies and modern agriculture reform in Heilongjiang, the county has seized all opportunities to construct a grain production base, developing grain processing efficiency and funding a green food industry. It built an 8-square-meter agricultural production park to bring together various agriculture projects for cooperation.

In August, 2014, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) Grain Processing Technology Institute (Harbin) settled in the industrial park, the first national organization instituted by CAAS in Heilongjiang. It focuses on grain processing, product innovation and inspection services. This move inaugurates a new cooperation method between national research groups and local food industries.

In future, Mulan plans to expand the market to Russia, North Korea and Japan with the help of the Heilongjiang Silk Road Belt and, in three to five years, become the leading food research centre of Northeast Asia. That development would improve Heilongjiang’s influence in the area. The government intends to pay more attention to ecological protection and sustainable development under emerging circumstances to create a better Mulan.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation.

Impact of Social Media on Chinese Beer Marketing

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

Don’t say that social media are changing the way we market products and services, until you have learned about their impact in China. The collectivist nature of Chinese culture has undoubtedly affected the speed in which social media have caught on in China. This particularly applies to beer in China.

Largest beer market in the world

China has been the world’s largest beer consuming and producing nation for a number of years. The competition is murderous and the number of individual players is decreasing almost yearly through mergers and acquisitions. The current number of breweries in China is 460, almost half the number of two decades ago. The top 5 breweries now have a combined market share of 73.7%. Chinese brewers are among the most heavy users of the new social media in China in the battle for the consumers’ attention. I have therefore chosen the Chinese brewing industry to illustrate how Chinese food and beverage companies are using the Internet.

The following table shows the development of Chinese beer production up to projections for 2029. It includes a breakdown in industrial and craft beer.

Weibo – China’s Twitter

Not only individuals use Weibo, the Chinese counterpart of Twitter or WeChat, the Chinese WhatsApp, but with many more possibilities, companies have discovered the power of the social media as well. Beer seems like a great product to investigate the way Chinese companies are exploiting the new media.

China’s top domestic brands Tsingdao and Yanjing immediately reflect a very Chinese cultural trait: imitating. The banners of the Weibo accounts of both brands are related to football. in China too, beer is THE drink for couch potatoes, watching football.

The first posts on today’s (26-9-2014) Weibo site for Yanjing mainly inform visitors of the quickest way to get their hands on a can of Yanjing beer. The other posts relate to everyday life issues like ‘the 30 things that are most worth doing in a man’s life’. I am not really excited.

Tsingdao’s site on the other hand gives a much livelier impression, and tells you what you can eat best with a glass of Tsingdao, or leads you to the Weibo site of the Tsingdao Beer Museum. That is 1 – 0 for Tsingdao, at least from my personal point of view.

International players cannot afford to lag behind and are following suit. Heineken’s Weibo home page is all about . . . Heineken, while Budweiser is measuring itself a musical image, both on the site’s banner and in the content of the first posts.

Public praise

Whether or not a company is active on a social network and if so, with what type of banner is not the most exciting aspect. Much more interesting is the analysis of how and how much netizens discuss a certain brand. In China as well, statisticians have discovered that all that online communication is by no means idle talk, but a true mine of information about the way consumer perceive a certain product, company or brand.

They are referring to this a the koubei (literally: ‘oral stele’) of a brand. Koubei is hard to translate properly. Dictionaries usually give ‘public praise’ as the translation, and I am inclined to go for ‘reputation’, although Chinese usually refers to that concept with another word. However, the figures featuring in statistic reports are not only about praise, but also refer to brand awareness, or the frequency in which a brand pops up in online conversations.

Let’s have a look at the statistics published this week about the way beer brands are discussed in the Chinese online media. The statistics have been compiled by the China Statistical Information Service Centre (CSISC). For each item, I will list the top 3 and Heineken, to see how this top international brand is faring in China.

The first dimension is ‘brand awareness index’.

Rank	brand	figure
1	Tsingdao	6.49
2	Yanjing	2.61
3	Pearl River	1.68
10	Heineken	0.03

Pearl River here ranks higher than Snow Flake, which is China’s current top brand according to turnover. Heineken ends up rather low, with two international brands, Budweiser and Carlsberg, before it.

The second dimension is ‘consumer interaction index’; how much netizens mention a brand in online conversations.

Rank	brand	figure
1	Tsingdao	5.79
2	Yanjing	1.96
3	Snow Flake	1.30
8	Heineken	0.41

This ranking coincides with the ranking using financial indicators. Heineken is quite close, but still lags behind two international brands: Asahi and again Budweiser.

Then we move on to the ‘quality recognition index’.

Rank	brand	figure
1	Tsingdao	4.51
2	Snow Flake	2.62
3	Pearl River	1.56
9	Heineken	0.38

Not much needs to be added here and Heineken only has, once more, Budweiser before it.

The ‘company praise index’ sounds intriguing. This is not about merely mentioning a brand, but doing so in a positive way.

Rank	brand	figure
1	Tsingdao	5.11
2	Snow Flake	3.72
3	Yanjing	2.08
8	Heineken	0.33

Can you guess what international brand outranks Heineken in this table?

The following index, ‘brand praise index’, resembles the previous one but concentrates on the brand rather than the producer.

Rank	brand	figure
1	Snow Flake	13.08
2	Tsingdao	6.43
3	Harbin	5.38
7	Heineken	0.65

Snow Flake is the big winner here, but Heineken is still behind Budweiser.

The final figure is the ‘brand health index’; how healthy do netizens believe a brand is. This seems odd for beer, and indeed the figures literally turn around the brands.

Rank	brand	figure
1	Qingke Beer	0.00
2	Dafuhao	0.00
3	Yellow River	-0.01
12	Heineken	-0.03

Qingke Beer is made in Tibet using the local Qingke barley. This has a relatively healthy image, but because this is about an alcoholic beverage, consumers do not really regard it as healthy. The other beers that come out in high position are all smaller local breweries, that apparently gives them more credit in the health department.

Our Heineken now ranks higher that all top domestic brands and its American competitor Budweiser. However, a number of international brands, like Suntory and Carlsberg, still rank slightly higher.

It is not immediately obvious to draw conclusions about these figures. I will leave that to my readers, but am also interesting in learning your reactions. I am sure more figures like this will be published for other product groups. I will make new items for them, or add them to existing items in this blog.

Output

So how much beer does China actually produce? Here is the regional breakdown of the volume during the first 9 months of 2014, with the in- or decrease compared to the same period in 2013.

Region	Volume (1000 L)	Growth (%)
China	40,924,478.98	1.74
Beijing	1,365,905.07	-4.05
Tianjin	249,319.97	9.17
Hebei	1,437,217.75	15
Shanxi	399,626.20	-2.92
Inner Mongolia	900,010.08	1.28
Liaoning	2,117,929.95	3.10
Jilin	1,135,387.64	1.15
Heilongjiang	1,585,479.68	-3.13
Shanghai	538,281.23	24.56
Jiangsu	1,801,601.02	-1.85
Zhejiang	2,267,633.18	-7.01
Anhui	1,237,393.38	-14.42
Fujian	1,530,728.09	-7.27
Jiangxi	1,020,149.91	4.94
Shandong	6,324,000.21	10.23
Henan	3,372,637.06	8.08
Hubei	1,851,839.85	-1.68
Hunan	651,440.76	-2.37
Guangdong	3,420,602.46	-1.54
Guangxi	1,547,119.61	1.64
Hainan	54,055.00	-6.11
Chongqing	608,640.74	-12.97
Sichuan	1,888,282.58	0.11
Guizhou	620,163.14	54.11
Yunnan	736,064.25	2.45
Tibet	122,985.56	-5.28
Shaanxi	855,607.11	3.59
Gansu	548,007.18	-4.29
Qinghai	86,810.00	2.61
Ningxia	234,304.97	8.96
Xinjiang	415,255.35	-5.40

More interest in traditiional culture (?)

The revival of interest in traditional culture seems to have returned to the Chinese brewing industry as well. China Resources has launched beer with painted faces from traditional Chinese operas on the labels early 2020.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation. He is a co-author of a major book introducing the cultural drivers behind China’s economic success.

The Evolution of Nutrition Guidelines in China

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

Many Western governments believe that citizens should be encouraged to take care of their own health and see to it that they get sufficient vitamins and minerals by eating a varied diet, with plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables, whole cereals and different protein sources. Adding vitamins and minerals to processed foods is allowed, as long as producers abide by the relevant regulations, but the government does not make public funds available to finance R&D and propagation of fortified foods.

Nutrition as government policy

China is one of the nations that actively support public nutrition. It is even regarded as a basic human right. This means that the government finances R&D into the field of food fortification and the promotion of fortified foods, as a means to enhance the general state of nutrition of the population.

This is not surprising, because the concepts of food, nutrition and medicine are much more intertwined in Chinese culture (Traditional Chinese Medicine TCM) than in the West.

The leading policy making organization here is the Public Nutrition Development Centre (PNDC), an organization under the State Development and Reform Committee of the State Council. R&D is coordinated by the Nutrition and Food Safety Institute of the Centre of Disease Control under the Ministry of Public Health.

This policy, combined with a population of approximately 1.4 billion people, has created a highly attractive market for suppliers of single nutrients, nutrient pre-mixes, and ready-to-eat fortified foods. The Food Ingredients China (FIC) 2018 trade fair (March 22 – 24) included 26 suppliers of various vitamins, and many more of minerals other nutritious food additives.

In October 2016, President Xi Jinping announced the Healthy China (HC 2030) blueprint, a declaration that made public health a precondition for all future economic and social development. The HC 2030 blueprint, released in Beijing by the Chinese government, includes 29 chapters covering public health services, environment management, the Chinese medical industry, and food and drug safety.

Nutrition pagoda

The Chinese love to localise foreign things and ideas. The Western nutrition pyramid has been made Chinese by changing it into the nutrition pagoda.

The Chinese Nutrition Society has issued a special food pyramid for pregnant women late 2019.

Generous budget

The Chinese government has a made a generous budget available to develop pre-mixed micronutrients.

Most micronutrients cannot be simply added to and mixed with other ingredients. Manufacturers of fortified foods need to be sure that the nutritional value of their product when consumed meets the promise they make in the nutrition information on the packaging. Some nutrients lose activity during heating, while others may dislike a low or high pH value. Some nutrients dislike one another’s presence.

This means that many nutrients need to be buffered or treated otherwise. This is specialist knowledge held by a small number of specialist scholars.

These researchers develop processes to protect single nutrients and formulate nutrient pre-mixes in state sponsored research facilities. However, those organizations are less suited for industrial production. A number of more entrepreneurial researchers have set up companies for the production of ready-to-use nutrients during recent years.

Several of them have been very successful and have proved to be fierce competitors to the multinational players like FMC or DSM, who are competing for a share in this lucrative market. The basis of their success is exactly their forming a close and effective chain with government regulators, research institutes, nutrition professionals and food and beverage manufacturers.

Ongoing projects

A number of projects has already been launched:

Infant formulae and ‘nutrition packages’ for primary school children; infant formulae are by far the largest application, as well as the best known one. The nutrition packages are ready to use packages of micronutrients for children of primary school age. Experiments have been conducted with the latter, handing out nutripacks to children (see picture below), but providing such packages has not been institutionalised so far. The packages use soy or soy protein as a basis and add Vitamins A, D, B1, B2, B12, folic acid, iron, zinc and calcium.
Vitamin A fortified cooking oil; as a rice eating nation, many Chinese lack vitamin A and the PNDC has been searching for the best carrier for this vitamin. Cooking oil is one vector that has been tried, in cooperation with COFCO. Products have been launched, but sales seems to be disappointing so far.
Wheat flour fortified with 8 nutrients; Vitamin A is also allowed in flour, another ingredient available in every Chinese household. Guchuan Flower has partnered with the government in developing fortified flour This experiment seemed to have failed as well, because consumers are not willing to pay a premium price.
Fortified rice; in cooperation with Bühler, DSM has develop a process to fortify rice with several vitamins and minerals by making fake rice granules that are mixed with regular rice. This Nutririce is produced in Wuxi (Jiangsu). Bühler acquired DSM’s share in the plant late 2013, but DSM remains committed to developing this product. As rice is regarded as a strategic staple, this entire development process has been conducted in close contact with the relevant authorities.
Iron fortified soy sauce; iron deficiency is huge in China and soy sauce has been found a proper carrier for iron (EDTA iron). It is current the most propagated fortification project in China. A number of soy sauce manufacturers have launched iron fortified products, but again so far the results seem to be somewhat disappointing.
Iron fortified wet noodles and steamed bread (mantou); this multi-nation research project has been initiated by the Food Fortification Initiative (FFI) Secretariat in 2009 and executed by the Nutrition and Food Safety Institute of the Centre of Disease Control. The results were promising, but this has so far not resulted in the regular production of such fortified products.
Probiotics; the fortification of suitable foods and beverages with probiotics like oligosaccharides was officially launched in January 2007. A sufficient intake of probiotics promotes a healthy gut flora.
Iodine salt: until recently, iodine salt was required in all manufactured foods. This law changed in May 2018. Since then iodine salt is only required in specific cases like regions with iodine deficiency. Another aspect of the new rules was that iodine also has to be listed on the packaging of manufactued foods.

The lack of progress of several of the the above mentioned projects seems to indicate that public nutrition in China still has a long way to go. Possibly, the many food safety incidents are negatively affecting these campaigns. Chinese consumers are still waiting for regular food to be safe for consumption, so there is little attention left for fortified food.

Moreover, as a result of the public food safety concern, the Chinese media regularly report about ‘excessive number of additives’ in certain foods like soft drinks or ice cream. Fortified foods need to comply with the regulation to indicate all ingredients on the label, so they may end up with an even longer list of ingredients than the non-fortified competitive products.

National Nutrition and Health Committee

China has created a special committee to implement the country’s national nutrition plan, according to the National Health Commission (NHC). Jointly established by NHC and 17 other government departments to coordinate and advance nutrition and health related work, the national nutrition and health committee held its inaugural meeting on Feb. 28, 2019, in Beijing. Among the key jobs are improving food nutrition and health standards that build upon food safety, and establishing subcommittees at local levels to organise nutrition education and training, to conduct pilot programs and spread scientific knowledge in this regard. The national nutrition plan (2017-2030) was released by the General Office of the State Council in July 2017, with the goal of raising awareness of nutrition among the Chinese people, reducing obesity and anemia among students.

From more to less meat

More recently, the Chinese authorities have included the global campaign for lowering meat consumption in the national dietary policies. Like all nations with a growing rate affluence, Chinese started to eat more meat, when they had more money to spend on food. Eating meat has always been a distinctive trait of the wealthy throughout Chinese history. The China National Dietary Guidelines already encourage Chinese consumers shifting toward a plant-based diet. The national government is planning to cut back meat consumption in half by 2030, not just for health and the environment, but also due to concerns for animal welfare, risks to workers, and antibiotic resistance.

A China Plant Based Foods Alliance (CPBFA) was established in December 2018. One of the first professional trade groups to represent plant-based food sector in China. It is a joint effort of the State Food and Nutrition Consultant Committee (SFNCC), Advisory Committee on Nutrition Guidance (ACNG) of China National Food Industry Association. The CPBFA advocates for plant-based ingredients, food and beverages, closely monitoring and thoughtfully influencing the legislative and regulatory environment. A list of members is not yet available, but a seminar organised late 2019 was attended by a mix of producers, consultants, policy makers and equipment suppliers. I will monitor the Alliance’s developments and report about them here.

Low fat, low salt, low sugar

This is another diet-related movement that has started in the Western world, but is now also gradually growing support in China. It has a common trait with the movement to lower meat consumption: fat, salt and sugar (in sufficient amounts) are also regarded as symbolic for a healthy diet in China. Poor people used to eat little meat, which automatically meant that they were happy with any fat they could get. Salt used to be as valuable as in other parts of the world (don’t forget the etymology of the word ‘salary’!) and sugar not much less. Nowadays, cooking oil, salt and sugar are available in abundance, but during the early decades of the Economic Reforms, Chinese were happy to indulge in these food ingredients that had to be rationed not that long before. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a dramatic increase of obesity, hypertension and diabetes among the Chinese.

The national and local governments have started drawing up dietary guidelines controlling fat, salt and sugar. Guidelines for snack food for primary and high school age students were proposed by the Beijing Public Health Commission and the China Food Distribution Association in May 2020.

Item	denomination	specification
Fat	fat free	<= 0.5g/100 g/ml
	low fat	<= 3g/100 g/ml
Sugar	sugar free	<= 0.5g/100 g/ml
	low sugar	<= 5g/100 g/ml
Salt	salt free	<= 5mg/100 g/ml
	low salt	120mg/100 g/ml

The Beijing proposals not only deal with lowering fat, salt and sugar, but also include adding more dietary fibre to the meals

Chinese dairy industry: from colonialism to imperialism

Through most of the imperial dynasties until the 20th century, milk was generally shunned as the rather disgusting food with horrible odour of the barbarian invaders. Foreigners brought cows to the port cities that had been ceded to them by the Chinese in the opium wars of the 19th century, and a few groups such as Mongolian nomads used milk that was fermented and made cheese-like products, but it was not part of the typical Chinese diet.

When the People’s Republic of China was born in 1949, its national dairy herd was said to consist of a mere 120,000 cows. However, the Chinese government has always supported the dairy industry since the founding of the PRC. However, evaporating raw milk into milk powder has been the major production process for a few decades. This made sense, as milk was produced in only a limited part of China and the milk powder could be easily distributed to other regions and then rehydrated into liquid milk. Milk powder was also the main imported dairy product. Another typical feature of the early decades of the modern Chinese dairy industry was that milk was regarded as an essential drink for two segments of the population: children and the elderly.

As China opened up to the market in the 1980s, milk powder began appearing in small shops where you could buy it with state-issued coupons. Parents bought it for their children, because they thought it would make them stronger. There also was a nationalist aspect to this. China felt humiliated ever since the opium wars, and developing a domestic dairy industry would make the national less dependent on foreign powers.

Today, China is the third-largest milk producer in the world, estimated to have around 13 million dairy cows, and the average person has gone from barely drinking milk at all to consuming about 30 kg of dairy produce a year. In a little over 30 years, milk has become the emblem of a modern, affluent society and a country able to feed its people. The transition has been driven by the Chinese Communist Party, for which milk is not just food, but a key strategic tool. The fact that people can afford animal produce is a visible symbol of the government’s success. Making animal produce, particularly milk, available to everyone across the country is a way of tackling potentially destabilising inequalities that have arisen between the big cities and some of the poorest rural areas while China has developed. In the poorest regions, nearly one in five children are still short for their age, from lack of adequate nutrition.

The Party’s current, 13th five-year plan identifies one of its top priorities as shifting from small-scale herds to larger industrial factory farms to keep its population of 1.4 billion in milk. Official guidelines on diet recommend people eat triple the amount of dairy foods that they typically consume currently. President Xi Jinping has talked in speeches about making a “new Chinese”. In 2014, he visited a factory owned by China’s largest dairy processor, Yili, and exhorted its workers to produce good, safe, dairy products. That new Chinese is expected to be a milk-drinker. His predecessors already launched the ideal that ‘each Chinese would drink one glass of milk per day’. This belief in the power of dairy stuck with the average Chinese as well. Some claim that it took hold with the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. New mass ownership of television sets had allowed Chinese people to see real foreigners, as opposed to actors, live on TV for the first time. “They were amazed to see how strong and tall foreigners were. They could jump twice as far, run twice as fast. They concluded that Americans ate a lot of beef and drank a lot of milk and Chinese people needed to catch up.” Chinese state planners were also impressed by the way the Japanese had developed. When the US defeated and occupied Japan after the Second World War, they had introduced feeding programs in Japanese schools to give children milk and eggs. Average heights increased within one generation.

As populations urbanise, they have always moved up the food chain, making the transition from diets largely based on grains and vegetable staples to ones in which meat, dairy, fats and sugars feature more prominently. China has followed the same trajectory. Dairy consumption grew rapidly through the 1980s and early 90s. The western model of retailing based on supermarkets with longer supply chains arrived in cities, too, making it possible for producers to distribute milk further and easy for shoppers to buy it. As incomes increased, people could afford refrigerators in their homes and wanted milk to put in them. For factory employees working long hours, dairy foods represented a convenient way to get nutrients without having to cook. Technology to produce UHT milk with longer sell-by dates, imported in the late 90s, gave consumption a further boost. Since fermenting milk helps break down lactose, yoghurt and other formulated dairy products were also marketed to overcome lactose-intolerance.

The reinvention of milk as a staple of modern China has required a series of remarkable feats. It has involved privatising farming, allowing processing companies to become corporations, and even converting desert areas into giant factory farms. As populations urbanise, they have always moved up the food chain, making the transition from diets largely based on grains and vegetable staples to ones in which meat, dairy, fats and sugars feature more prominently. China has followed the same trajectory. Dairy consumption grew rapidly through the 1980s and early 90s. The western model of retailing based on supermarkets with longer supply chains arrived in cities, too, making it possible for producers to distribute milk further and easy for shoppers to buy it.

While incomes increased, people could afford refrigerators in their homes and wanted milk to put in them. For factory employees working long hours, dairy foods represented a convenient way to get nutrients without having to cook. Technology to produce UHT milk with longer sell-by dates, imported in the late 90s, gave consumption a further boost. Since fermenting milk helps break down lactose, new yoghurt products were also marketed to overcome lactose-intolerance.

Now the global impact of China’s ever-expanding dairy sector is causing concern in other countries. Dairy farming requires access to vast quantities of fresh water: it takes an estimated 1,020 litres of water to make one litre of milk. But China suffers from water scarcity, and has been buying land and water rights abroad, as well as establishing large-scale processing factories in other countries. A recent move in this respect was the announcement that Yili Dairy (Inner Mongolia) intended to acquire New Zealand’s Westland Milk Products. The news immediately triggered a host of positive and negative reactions, with headlines like: ‘Can the world quench China’s bottomless thirst for milk?’. So, while Western imperialism laid the foundation of the modern Chinese dairy industry, China is now ‘colonising’ the former imperialists.

National School Milk Programme

The Chinese government has introduced the National School Milk Programme in 2000 to support the improvement of students’ nutrition and the development of the Chinese dairy industry. After a decade of operation, the programme reached more than 8 mln students by the end of 2011. And thanks to the Nutrition Improvement Programme for Rural Compulsory Education Students (NIPRCES) launched in 2012, the School Milk Programme more than doubled its coverage in the following years. At present, nearly 20 mln Chinese students receive milk in their schools every day on average. The School Milk Programme creates demand for higher quality and locally produced and UHT processed milk, sourced from licensed dairies. After the School Milk Programme was introduced in 2000, China’s raw milk production increased by 10% per annum over a period of 13 years, dairy cattle stock increased from 4.6 mln to 14.4 mln and annual dairy products consumption volume per person grew from 6.7kg to 27.86kg. A study made in 2009 shows that children gained an extra of 1.2cm in terms of height and 0.6 kg in terms of weight on average after receiving school milk regularly for three years. Though the School Milk Programme has expanded quickly over the past years, it covers only 15% of the total students at the stage of mandatory education. In light of increasing public attention on student nutrition status and the expansion of programmes like NIPRCES, the School Milk Programme is expected to benefit more students in the future.

Entrepreneurial initiatives

However, there is already a large number of fortified foods available in China. Many of them add single nutrients, in particular calcium. Calcium deficiency is rampant in China as well, and calcium compounds are easy to add to foods and beverages. Iron, zinc, magnesium and vitamins in various combinations are added too.

An interesting example is Mondelez (formerly Kraft) that is producing biscuits in China with 10 nutrients added. The following table shows the content of each nutrient per 100 gr of finished product as indicated on the consumer packaging.

Nutrient	dosage
Vitamin A	833 IU
Vitamin B1	0.4 mg
Vitamin B2	0.4 mg
Niacin	4.0 mg
Vitamin B4	0.4 mg
Vitamin D	3.2 mg
Folic acid	58 mg
Zinc	4.5 mg
Iron	4.0 mg
Calcium	290 mg

Another example worth mentioning here is Bread Pan, produced by Oishi, a Chinese venture of Philippines based Liwayway Holdings. The bread is sold as packed slices and marketed as a breakfast food. It is flavoured with shredded beef. Added nutrients per serving are listed as follows.

Nutrient	dosage
Vitamin A	43 iu
Vitamin C	9.80 mg
Vitamin D3	17.55 iu
Vitamin B1	0.50 mg
Vitamin B2	0.15 mg
Vitamin B3	1.30 mg
Vitamin B6	0.15 mg
Vitamin B9	11.70 mg
Vitamin B12	0.13 mg
Vitamin B5	0.40 mg
Calcium	63 mg
Iron	0.70 mg
Zinc	0.40 mg

Some manufacturers seem to struggle between the will to make their product more nutritious additives and the need to maintaining the texture and flavour of the original product. In other posts, I have pointed out that most industrial bread sold in China comes with an impressive ingredients list. Mankattan Food is offering a ‘fortified bread’ with the following ingredients.

Whole wheat flour, high gluten wheat flour, water, HFCS, yeast, shortening, salt, gluten powder, calcium propionate, calcium carbonate, compound enzyme (calcium sulfate, vitamin C, xylanase, alfa-amylase, glucose oxidase), calcium lactate, food flavour, beta-carotene, mixed vitamins and minerals (maltodextrin, ferrous pyrophosphate, nicotinamide, zinc oxide, vitamin B1, vitamin B2).

This bread indeed supplies the consumer with some additional nutrients, but also contains a number of non-natural ingredients that are not strictly needed to make artisanal bread.

Most of these manufacturers of fortified foods and drinks do not cooperate with PNDC. This indicates that lack of strategic and marketing knowledge is part of the problem in propagating public nutrition by the authorities.

Yake Food (Fujian) produces a fruit-flavoured candy, Yake V9 Candy, enriched with 9 vitamins.

Each candy is said to contain the following vitamins:

Vitamin	Dosage
C	23.04 mg
B3	3.13 mg
E	2.82 mg
B5	1.37 mg
B2	0.32 mg
B1	0.32 mg
B6	0.27 mg
Folic acid	79.8 mg
B12	0.47 mg

Ice cream maker Zhongjuegao has launched ‘ice cream for non-adults’ in 2019. It is fortified with vitamins A and D and calcium, as many drinking milk products in China.

Does it work?

So is a public nutrition policy like that of the Chinese government more effective that the propaganda to eat well policy of most Western governments? So far, no comparative research has been conducted. My personal impression (I have been involved in a global market survey concerning public nutrition) is that big city dwellers in China or West Europe usually have few nutrition problems. They have the knowledge about nutrition and have access to nutritious food ingredients. The difference could be in the poorer regions on those countries and the entire globe. It does make sense to add nutrients to staple foods or food ingredients that are used in most households.

Here are some of the results of market surveys about the perception of the nutritional value of several foods and food ingredients in 2021 and 2023.

And here is a table showing the nutritional perceptions of food (groups) in 2024.

The influence of nutritional education is most clearly visible in the consumption of supplements among Chinese consumers (2024).

The Rich History of Peking Duck: A Culinary Journey

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Peter Peverelli

According to a Chinese saying, no visit to Beijing is complete if you miss climbing the Great Wall or dining on Peking Duck.

Long history

Eating roast duck in China dates back as far as the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420 – 589). Up until the Southern Song Dynasty (1127 – 1279), ducks were roasted in the area around Jinling, today’s Nanjing. According to the book of The Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendors Past, written by Meng Yuanlao (1090-1150). The book gives a lively and detailed description of life in the Northern Song capital of Bianliang, based on the author’s reminiscences of his youthful years there.

Ducks eggs are consumed more in China than in European cuisine. They are particularly popular are raw material for preserved eggs.

The following Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368; yes, there is an overlap with the Song, as the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty conquered China gradually) rulers moved their capital city to Beijing. According to the Standard History of the Yuan, Roasted Duck only spread to Beijing after Bayan of the Baarin the general of the Yuan Dynasty conquered Lin’an, the then capital city of the Southern Song Dynasty. When a Dynasty overthrows another dynasty the capital also changes, the general relocated all the skilled workers from Lin’an, to the new northern capital, Beijing and the skilled duck chef was among them.

The ducks were originally roasted in a conventional convection oven until Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911), when a new type of cooking method and special oven were invented. According to the new method, the ducks were suspended over the flame in an open oven. In that way, the interior and the skin of the ducks were cooked simultaneously, producing that well known end-product with its tender meat and crispy (brushed with a layer of sugar) skin. Preparing a Peking roast duck takes at least four steps: preparing the duck, pumping air beneath the skin, drying and roasting.

The restaurant best known for applying this method was Quanjude, founded in 1864 by Yang Quanren. Today, Quanjude has almost become a synonym of Beijing Roast Duck to many Chinese. It is a state owned enterprise listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Quanjude’s Hepingmen branch not only offers gourmets a chance to dig into the traditional food but also the whole roast-duck culture, thanks to a 1000 square meter museum on the seventh floor.

From 1949, Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China would often treat foreign guests with Peking Duck. It became part of China’s foreign diplomacy, along with table-tennis.

More local cuisinese are known for their duck dishes, in particular that of Nanjing, where people prefer to eat pieces of duck, rather than the whole thing. However, Peking Duck is still the national leader.

The Chinese duck raising industry exceeded RMB 100 billion for the first time in 2018.

The British connection

Present day ‘Peking’ ducks actually have an English background. Cherry Valley, based in the northern English county of Lincolnshire, started importing interbred Peking ducks to China in the 1980s. Some insiders estimate that by 2016, at least 75% of all ducks sold in China were Cherry Valley breeds. Others give a lower estimate of about 60%. Beijing-based cooks prefer the local ducks, which have a higher fat percentage in weight.

New presentations

Quanjude had updated its menu earlier in July 2015 to showcase its long-standing culinary heritage. The latest menu features “peony duck”, which is a roast duck presented like a peony flower in full blossom — the delicately sliced breast meat is layered to give the impression of petals, while boiled towel gourd parts make up the green stalk and leaves. The dish was first served at a State banquet during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit November 2014 in Beijing, where leaders of more than 20 member economies were present. The Quanjude-made dish has since been served to customers at all branches of the restaurant in Beijing, according to Sun Zhongmin, director for the group’s innovation center. The restaurant has also launched an individual summer special menu of 11 new dishes consisting of both cold and hot items, soups, dumplings and desserts.

Another restaurant experimenting with modernised version of the traditional Peking Duck is the Shang Palace Restaurant in Beijing. However, the novelty is mainly expressed in the presentation of the various ingredients (pancakes, condiments, etc.) as shown by the picture.

Patent

A recent innovation was introduced by Sun Lixin of the Bianyifang Duck Restaurant (founded in 1416) in 2003. Sun added a step before roasting – soaking the 3-kg duck in pure juice extracted from onions, carrots, celery, bay leaves, rosemary, tarragon, celery seeds, and aniseed, adding mushroom powder and mirin. A patent was granted for this process (patent nr.: CN1543863). The vegetable juice, being alkaline, eliminates the pungency of the duck but also reduces the duck fat beneath the skin.

A complete meal

Peking Duck is eaten with shredded spring onions and cucumber dipped in a sweet fermented sauce (jiang), and wrapped in thing wheat pancakes. The liver, stomach and heart are usually prepared separately and served as side dishes. The meal ends with duck soup made from the carcass and whatever else is still left of the duck.

Peking Duck is by no means light food. Even though the new roasting method removes a major part of the fat, the total Peking Duck experience it is still high in protein and carbohydrates. It is so tasty, that you keep eating, and by the time the signal from your stomach telling you that it has more than enough reaches your brain, it is too late.

Peking Duck is therefore not a dish that is eaten frequently. It is nice to reserve it for a special occasion like a holiday or a birthday, enjoying it with the entire family or a group of friends.

Innovation

The typical route to innovate Peking Duck and adapt it to the life of the modern urban Chinese is to chop the bird in small one-bite pieces. It so happens that Chinese love to nibble on bones, or chew on tougher bits of meat, much different from the Western preference for tender meat.

A number of companies have therefore developed duck wings, duck tongues, duck necks, duck hearts or duck gizzards as one-bite snacks. They are usually individually wrapped, with around 20 snacks in a larger pack.

These products are much easier to take pack in your hand luggage on a trip, or eat while watching TV or reading a book. Sharing a few duck wings is also less of a burden to the body than eating an entire duck.

Juewei duck necks – the ultimate taste

One manufacturer of duck products has gained national fame with its duck necks that are not only sold as packed foods in supermarkets, but also fresh and hot from its 5000 special outlets.The company was established in 2006 as Jueweixuan Business Management Corporation in Changsha (Hunan). A consortium including Kunwu Jiuding Capital Co., Ltd. and Fosun Group has invested RMB 260 million in Juewei in 2011. Juewei generated a turnover of RMB 4.386 billion in 2018; up 13.46%.

The company’s brand name Juewei literally means ‘ultimate taste’. This may strike us as rather presumptuous, but the popularity of the products (as well as the large number of copy cats) seems to indicate that the company has lived up to the promise contained in its name. Juewei Duck Necks are as well known in China as KFC’s hot wings. It is an interesting fight between the Chinese duck and the American chicken, and in view of the recent quality problems that have affected KFC in China, the duck seems to be on the winning hand. However, the battle is still going one.

By the way; the standard recipe for duck necks includes . . . chicken bones, great and cheap flavour enhancers.

Zhouheiya – a model in brand building

Zhouheiya (Hubei) is another Chinese fast food chain known for their signature spicy duck necks. It gained its name from its founder, self made billionaire Zhou Fuyu. Zhouheiya has 400 stores in communities, airports, train stations and other major locations across China. An alliance between a food chain famous for duck necks and a robot might not seem like the most likely combination. But Zhouheiya made it possible by advertising in the film Transformers 4, benefiting immensely from the cooperation. Zhouheiya has ambitious plans to enlarge its production in America and Europe.

Zhouheiya got listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2016. Credit Suisse Group AG and Morgan Stanley are sponsors, or banks responsible for the IPO.

Zhouheiya’s factory

Zhouheiya generated a turnover of RMB 3.249 bln in 2017; up 15.4%. The company has mainly lifted by surging online sales and increased number of retail stores across the country. The group has established a strong presence in 11 major domestic online market places, including one newly operated storefront on Jumei.com, in the first half of 2017. “By leveraging its own social media channels, the company enhanced customer loyalty by active interaction with the customers.” The company has been reshaping its brand into a trendy snack in an attempt to lure young customers, especially millennials, into buying what used to be seen as an old fashioned snack food. Zhouheiya made headlines in 2014 when its logo briefly appeared on screen in the Hollywood blockbuster Transformers: Age of Extinction, creating valuable media buzz for the brand.

Zhouheiya expanded its business to agrifood research by taking a 16.67% stake in Hubei Mingchuang Agritechnology Development Co. early 2022.

Another competitor from Hubei is Jingwu (Kingwuu). Jingwu has derived its name from the well-known Jingwu Road in Wuhan. The company is a supplier of cooked and marinated duck and goose meat products. Jingwu aims to develop a series of products with special characteristics including preserved Jingwu duck necks, and duck feet with a unique taste.

One of the earlier players in the lucrative duck neck market is Huangshanghuang from Jiangxi province. This company was founded in 1993 as a collective enterprise in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi and gradually developed into the Huangshanghuang Food Group. It was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2012. Although it is a predecessor of Zhouheiya and Juewei, Huangshanghuang’s turnover of 2017 was RMB 1.478 bln, so considerably less than the two leaders. However, as Huangshanghuang has a much broader product range, we should be careful in comparing it with the two duck specialists.

Duck necks have become such a fad these days, that a duck neck eating competition was organised in Wuhan in July 2015. According to the rules, participants were asked to finish a 350 gr box of duck necks and leave no more than 150 gr of bones in as short a time as possible. However, the success of the two Wuhan-based companies Juewei and Zhouheiya is so huge, that one competitor, Shanghai-based Jiujiuya, has adopted a strategy to attack them in their own home region. Jiujiuya is advertising its products as ‘Wuhan-style duck necks’, ‘Wuhan-style duck wings’, etc. The company also appointed a former CEO of a major mineral water brand from Guangzhou as its regional manager for Central China, indicating that it is focusing its marketing efforts on the heartland of duck necks. The following picture shows a typical Jiujiuya outlet.

In 2020, Jiujiuya changed its positioning strategy to the then current trend of imitating Chinese advertising of the 1920s and 30s.

Goose chasing the duck

Zhouheiya entered 2018 with a new strategy to battle its main competitor: the company added a range of goose products to its portofolio. So far, there has been no reaction to this move from Juewei.

From duck necks to ducklings

The Chinese affection for nibbling on duck necks has stimulated the creation of several innovative dishes. Here is lovely one that I found on a Chinese recipe site. The name of the dish is ‘miniature babao calabash ducks’. The term babao ‘eight treasures’ has been introduced in an earlier post on babao porridge. As the picture shows, the ‘ducklings’ in this dish indeed look like miniature calabashes. They are in fact sections of duck necks, stuffed with glutinous rice. On the plate they strike you as small calabashes. Apparently, the Chinese cook does not want to run the risk that discriminating customers will criticise that they ‘don’t look like ducklings at all’. So he has carved a ducks out of vegetables; to make the dish more ‘ducky’. This is one of those Chinese paradoxes: the veggie ducks look more like ducks that the duck neck ducklings do.

Bloody profits

Even duck blood can be transformed into earnings. Huaying Cherry Valley (Xinyang, Henan) is investing in improving duck blood processing. The company has a special subsidiary to develop a range of products from duck blood, including blood powder and blood beancurd. The company processed more than 10 000 t of duck blood in 2014.

Hearty snack

Piaoling Dashu has developed duck hearts into snack food. This food ranks under the traditional Chinese category luwei, meat cooked with a mix of spices in which star aniseed is the most prominent. Ingredients:

Duck hearts, sugar, soy sauce, vegetable oil, salt, chicken essence, MSG, spices, food flavours

Duck burger

Dong Zhenxiang, Beijing’s legendary Peking Duck maestro, once joked that would serve up his specialty on a hamburger bun with a side of fries. Da Dong’s birds are so enshrined for special occasions that a downmarket sandwich, paper-wrapped for easy takeaway, seemed just plain odd. But no－he really pulled it off and we must admit that Dong is really on to something. His succulent signature duck comes with a tart bit of pickle in the salad layer that makes the plum sauce sing on the fresh bun.

Dadong – Duck with a Western touch

A newcomer in the world of Peking Duck is Dadong. The name of this restaurant chain is derived from the surname of the chef/owner Dong Zhenxiang. He uses customised Justa ovens whose design is top-secret. They have indentations on the walls that bring the oven up to the right temperature. Dadong’s specialty is subuni (literally: ‘crispy, not greasy’) roast duck. However, the customers of Dadong are not only paying to enjoy the food, they also will experience Dadong’s yijing (‘artistic conception’) cuisine.

Yijing cuisine features an exquisite Chinese cultural interpretation to culinary creations – each dish is incorporated with the elements of artworks such as Chinese poetry, literature, painting and bonsai grooming. It makes many of Dadong’s dishes resemble those of European Michelin-starred dishes. The first US subsidiary of Dadong has opened its doors in New York on Dec. 11, 2017. Dadong has had a tough time impressing the New York critics. According to Mr. Dong in an interview of January 2019, the subsidiary in New York is more of an artisan bistro, a new concept, but it is hardly making any profit.

Dadong expanded its overseas presence further by teaming up with Dubai-based JA Resorts and Hotels in 2018, as the latter is eager to attract more Chinese tourists. The group’s Manafaru resort hosted over 5000 holiday goers from China in the past year, accounting for about 50% of total guests.

Duck as ingredient

Staying true to the core notion of this blog, ingredients, I need to point out how duck can also be even further processed to a food ingredient: duck powder. According to a major producer, Weixiangyuan (Guangdong), duck powder can be used to flavour a wide range of foods like soup, leisure food, snack food, biscuits, etc.

Peverelli on Chinese food and culture

Chinese food beverage ingredients industry

The Rise of Slow Food Movement in China

Ready-to-Drink Coffee in China: A Disruptive Trend

Urban Farming: A Response to China’s Food Safety Crisis

Traditional vs Modern Chinese Candies Explained

History and Growth of Chinese Chili Cuisine

China’s Growing Olive Oil Market: An Analysis

Harbin’s Unique Culinary Heritage

Impact of Social Media on Chinese Beer Marketing

The Evolution of Nutrition Guidelines in China

The Rich History of Peking Duck: A Culinary Journey

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