Related stories

Call for Toilets in Business Venues to Open to Public Siheyuan: Old Beijing Style Appeals to Many Rocky Route to Business Success HSBC Beijing Branch First to Launch RMB Services Alexandre Fauvet talks about Business Beijing

Rags to Riches: Beijing Hongluo Foodstuff Company

When people visit a new place, they usually return with a souvenir of the place for their friends and family. Since you can’t carry the Great Wall or the Summer Palace with you, what do you take home when you visit Beijing? Try guofu, or Beijing’s preserved fruit. In Beijing’s markets, the most common guofu bear the Hongluo Foodstuff name.

Huairou District is famed for its fruit, and Beijing Hongluo Foodstuff Company Limited is located in Huairou, the company’s fresh fruit base since 1956. As a China Time Honoured Brand company, Hongluo goes a long way back indeed.

A star is born

In the early Qianlong period, Emperor Qianlong (1711–99) once visited the Hongluo Temple, and was treated to preserved fruits by the temple’s abbot. The emperor was so impressed that he appointed one of his imperial cooks to stay on at the temple to learn the art of making preserved fruit. That skill has been passed down the generations since. In 1956, the eighth disciple of the imperial cook established a preserved fruit factory in Huairou District. Thus the Hongluo Foodstuff Company was born, which morphed from a workshop into a food manufacturer over decades.

During its half a century of development, the Beijing Hongluo Foodstuff Company Limited set up three factories: the Beijing Preserved Fruit Factory, Beijing Luye Jelly Factory and Beijing Zhengyuan Foodstuff Company Limited, employing 1,000.

Walking into Hongluo’s products exhibition hall, the 120-odd varieties of well-packaged food products are enough to tickle your taste buds. Vice-General Manager Niu Jinxia, who has worked for the company since 1982, narrated the growth of the company. Before 1986, she said, the products were not well packaged; raw products were sold in bulk; value-added was low and the hygiene was doubtful. The way things were being run obviously had to change. In 1986, when a sales counter was set up in the Great Hall of the People, the company decided that the quality of its wares had to be improved. These days, the products are packaged in an array of attractive gift wrappings, a huge hit with the customers. But it’s not just the appearance that has improved, so has the quality of the products.

Quality is Prized

    Hongluo Foodstuff sees quality as its main strength, as evident from the myriad awards and prizes the company has bagged over the years, such as the 2003 Safety and High-Quality Promised Food award by the China National Food Industry Association, 2004–2005 National Food Safety Example Enterprise by the China Food Security Annual Conference and The Green Food award by the China Green Food Development Centre.

“Quality is the sole goal of every processing procedure,” said Liu Wenbo, in charge of Hongluo Foodstuff’s quality control. From the procurement of raw materials to processing and packaging, every step in the production cycle is assiduously monitored. This eye for detail is reflected in the minutest of aspects, such as the SO2 content of the products. The limit set by China’s National Standard (Guo Biao) is 0.35 grams per 1,000 grams, but Hongluo strictly keeps it at 0.25.

Innovation Builds Sales

    While quality is a company’s foundation, innovation and sales networks are the lifeblood of any successful company. Customers’ tastes can change over time and sameness is the surest way to drive them away. Fierce competition also spurs Hongluo to innovate constantly.

The transformation of Hongluo from a small workshop into a market leader with annual sales of 121.87 million yuan (US$16.04 million) did not happen by chance. From the first sales counter at the Great Hall of the People, they have learned that reputation is key to building a market. Currently, the company has more than 200 sales counters in Beijing’s major shopping centres and supermarkets. Hongluo has also established more than 1,000 wholesale outlets around China. Its products are exported to the United States, Russia, Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

A Winner for local farmers

As a leading company in the agricultural product processing industry, Hongluo has made an agreement with the farmers to procure its fruits and other agricultural products from Huairou and Pinggu districts. The local farmers, in turn, look up to Hongluo.

“Hongluo values its reputation and honours its contracts. All our products are purchased by the company,” said Wang Haimin, a local farmer.

In 2006, Hongluo bought 1,000 tons of sweet potatoes and 1,500 tons of Chinese hawthorn, bringing a total income of 1.9 million yuan (US$247,000) to the local farmers.