Our reporter Zhang Dianbiao
The live broadcast was about to "turn over", and Shu Zijian simply went to the rescue by himself.
Shu Zijian is the Secretary of the Party Branch of the Poverty Alleviation Project in Pingjiang County of Country Garden. In June this year, Country Garden Group held a live broadcast with the theme of consumer poverty alleviation in Pingjiang, Hunan, focusing on the promotion of spicy strips, and tens of thousands of people entered the live broadcast room.
In the pharmaceutical-grade clean workshop, the flour is extruded and matured, similar to steamed buns in a pressure cooker. Picture provided by interviewee
Pingjiang is the birthplace of spicy strips. As a local economic pillar and poverty alleviation tool, nearly half of the 1.11 million people in Pingjiang benefited from the spicy strip industry. Shu Zijian and his team meticulously planned to "justify the name of spicy bar" through live broadcast.
To the surprise of the Country Garden's poverty alleviation team, the "rectification of the name" did not begin, and the "rollover" came first: "Do you use waste oil in the making of spicy sticks?" "Will you have diarrhea if you eat too much spicy sticks?" ?"
In the live broadcast room, on the one hand, the anchor enthusiastically recommended spicy food, and on the other hand, the audience was "stunned" one question after another-consumers had too many doubts about spicy food. The anchor’s rhythm was disrupted, and the live streaming turned into an online debate.
"The health and hygiene of the spicy strips in Pingjiang now fully meet the standards, and the old impression has changed!" Shu Zijian tried to stabilize the scene. He patiently introduced the materials and production links of the spicy strips, taking out pictures to show the modernization. Spicy strip production workshop.
In the end, Shu Zijian convincingly dispelled the doubts of consumers with professional and sincere answers, and tens of thousands of netizens swept away the spicy notes they prepared.
Indeed, as a native of Pingjiang, Shu Zijian knows the roots of spicy strips. Many of his relatives and friends have been in the spicy strips industry and experienced the breakthrough process of the Pingjiang spicy strips industry from barbaric growth to self-regulation and upgrading. .
"Poverty alleviation heroes" in poor counties
Where there is a weather forecast, there are people from Pingjiang who make spicy strips
In 1998, the Yangtze River was flooded, Pingjiang was hit, and the price of soybeans was soaring. The local small soy sauce workshops closed down one after another. Soybeans are the raw material for Pingjiang's specialty dried soy sauce.
In the three cities and towns, Qiu Ping, Li Mengneng and Zhong Qingyuan, who were unwilling to wait and die, tried to use flour instead of soybean flour. If you don’t use soy flour, you can’t call it dried sauce. What is it called? Call it spicy strips. In this way, after the flour is extruded and matured, the spices are mixed in to make the first spicy stick.
Unexpectedly, the spicy strips were so popular that 90% of the dried sauce workshops in Pingjiang were changed to spicy strips factories. Every time before the Spring Festival and the beginning of the school season, trucks from all over the country flood into Pingjiang. There are four or five vehicles at the door of every spicy tiao factory. It often takes a week or even a month to get the goods.
In less than two years in the industry, veteran Zhang Yudong paid off the one million he owed his business. The three towns with the highest concentration of spicy tiao factories won the title of "Boss Town".
Pingjiang, located at the junction of Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxi, is a poor county, but the wages are higher than that of some provincial capitals. The "credit" is spicy.
At that time, every time after the Spring Festival, Zhang Yudong sent employees into the village to "rob workers". In order to recruit workers, in addition to fighting for wages, the Latiao factories also promised to pay referral fees as long as old employees can bring new employees.
90% of the area of Pingjiang is mountainous and hilly, where wheat is not produced and transportation is inconvenient. As labor costs continue to rise, the people in Pingjiang began to open spicy strip factories across the country. There is even a saying in Pingjiang: Where there is a weather forecast, there are people from Pingjiang who make spicy strips.
After 22 years of development, there are more than 1,000 spicy tiao enterprises nationwide, with an output value of about 58 billion yuan, directly absorbing 200,000 jobs. More than 90% of these enterprises were founded by Pingjiang people. In Pingjiang County, there are 126 spicy tiao enterprises with an output value of about 20 billion yuan and more than 60,000 direct employees.
"One person enters the factory, the whole family gets rid of poverty." In 2019, the average annual salary of the employees in the spicy strip industry in Pingjiang County is 36,000 yuan, which is higher than that of other local enterprises, and some factories even catch up with Changsha. To this end, the Poverty Alleviation Team of Country Garden Pingjiang County organizes employment fairs for poverty alleviation, and also specializes in setting up a recruitment desk for spicy strips.
In the eyes of Ye Jianzhi, director of the Poverty Alleviation Office of Pingjiang County, Latiao went out of the mountains, to the whole country, and even sold abroad, which itself is a successful exploration of Pingjiang people's escape from poverty.
Since the fight against poverty began, Pingjiang Latiao enterprises have helped more than 5,000 poor households escape poverty stably through arranging employment, setting up poverty alleviation workshops, transferring land, and purchasing raw materials.
Yang Yu, a member of the Poverty Alleviation Task Force and Deputy County Mayor of the Ministry of Finance in Pingjiang County, Hunan Province, said that the upper reaches of the spicy strip industry can drive the cultivation and production of pepper, pepper, rape and other agricultural and sideline products, and the midstream can drive the food industry, packaging and printing, and machinery manufacturing. Industry, downstream can promote logistics, e-commerce and other industries, with strong scalability and driving effect.
Wu Lianzhong, deputy director of the Market Supervision Administration of Pingjiang County, estimates that spicy strips are the pillar industry of Pingjiang, directly driving about 100,000 jobs in upstream and downstream industries. Behind 100,000 people are 100,000 families, covering about five to six hundred thousand people, while Pingjiang has only 1.11 million people in total.
The embarrassment of "national snacks"
Spicy strips that dare not speak, the waist is not straight
While La Tiao contributed to Pingjiang’s poverty alleviation, the people of Pingjiang used to keep secret of "La Tiao" and did not dare to say that they were the birthplace of La Tiao, nor did La Tiao manufacturers dare to stand upright. When someone asks, he always vaguely says that he is in the deli business.
In Zhang Yudong's impression, spicy strips are always affixed with the negative labels of "junk food" and "unhealthy". Almost every once in a while, the media exposes the "problem hot strips". The main market for hot strips is also around rural schools.
During a market research, Zhang Yudong discovered that many small shops around the school hid the spicy strips when they were inspected. Once it is exposed, the school is not allowed to sell it, and parents are not allowed to buy it. The gluttonous students can only secretly buy and eat secretly, which makes Zhang Yudong, who is in compliance with production, uneasy.
In Zhang Yudong's view, the reason why the spicy strip industry is stuck in the food safety quagmire is that on the one hand, the threshold of the industry's initial development is too low and everyone swarms in; on the other hand, it is because the industry is too "young" and there is no uniform standard to follow.
Chen Peng, secretary general of the Pingjiang County Food Association, remembers that around 2000, some spicy strip workshops even piled flour and other spices directly on the ground like sand. The production environment was simple and unhygienic.
The lingering embarrassment prompted Zhang Yudong, Xu Wanghui and other industry players to call for and promote the formulation of the industry's first local standard "Xiang Flavor Flour Cooked Food", which was revised several times and changed to "Extruded Pastry". At the beginning, there were black workshops and supervisory departments fighting guerrillas, and fled to other places. As localities have successively formulated their own standards with reference to Hunan's local standards, the market shuffle has intensified, black workshops have been further out, and compliance companies have taken advantage of the trend.
By 2013, after several rounds of rectification, the number of spicy strip companies in the country has almost halved, while the output value of the spicy strip industry has increased from the initial several hundred million yuan to 30 or 40 billion. Spicy bars are even called "national snacks" by consumers.
Although at this time most of the spicy strip companies have passed the QS production license certification and achieved standardized production, the industry still cannot completely get rid of the old "label". Occasionally, problematic companies have problematic products, and the entire industry has to "pay."
Spicy Tiao "War of Dignity"
Get rid of the negative label, and "the countryside surrounds the city" upright
To get rid of the embarrassment completely, Zhang Yudong's first thought was to make spicy strips in the cleanest workshop.
In 2013, Zhang Yudong decided to invest 30 million yuan to build the industry's first 100,000-level GMP clean workshop, which is the standard for the production of medical injections. At the same time, he also cut off the most popular “spicy bar for a dollar” in the factory, and resolutely realized the upgrade of the spicy bar. At that time, Zhang Yudong’s spicy strip factory had sales of 500 million yuan a year, and “one dollar spicy strip” accounted for 300 million yuan.
Some dealers asserted: "This can only be a dead end." Zhang Yudong told them that if they don't, the upstream and downstream industrial chains will have no dignity.
The person in charge of production in the factory also does not support it. Compared with ordinary workshops, GMP clean workshops only cost 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a day for air circulation. According to the equipment and production efficiency at the time, this investment would take five to ten years to see a return.
What makes employees even more frustrated is that after cutting down the old production line, there are only a few workers left in the workshop that was full of people. The original piece-rate workers can only get guaranteed wages.
Zhang Yudong's confidence comes from "not offending consumers." In the next few years, Zhang Yudong took the lead in upgrading raw materials, using natural flour, non-GMO cooking oil, without adding cyclamate, acesulfame K, neotame, aspartame and other synthetic sweeteners, and eliminating pigments and chemically synthesized preservatives .
With the further upgrade and investment of equipment, the output value of the GMP workshop is getting higher and higher, and the return has been seen within a few years. Originally, rural elementary school students were the main consumer group, but now they are entering the major supermarkets dignifiedly. The major consumer groups have become college students and white-collar workers aged 18 to 35.
Zhang Yudong only dared to say that he was a Latiao after the realization of "rural surrounding the city". He had been in the industry for more than ten years.
At the same time, in order to help more enterprises upgrade and transform, the supervisors of the Pingjiang County Market Supervision Administration have also transformed themselves from "cats catching mice" to "nanny" and "spicy tiao experts." Since last year, under the guidance and help of the Pingjiang County Market Supervision and Administration Bureau, 12 spicy strip factories have invested 13 million yuan in the renovation of clean workshops, and 52 have invested nearly 30 million yuan in upgrading plant equipment.
The "image" of Latiao companies can even be seen by laymen. In 2019, the Country Garden Poverty Alleviation Team in Pingjiang County took the initiative to focus on several spicy noodle companies, and displayed standardized spicy noodle production processes on social media to help consumers dispel the doubts about the “low-end” spicy noodles and help spicy noodles. With the promotion of corporate brand and product promotion, the event attracted 60 million hits.
In Zhang Yudong's view, getting rid of embarrassment is not a day's work. In the final analysis, manufacturers need to be always in awe of consumers and food health, and change from a "factory thinking" that only pays attention to making money to a "consumer thinking" that focuses on health and consumer experience.
Second breakout: getting rid of the "identity crisis"
"Say goodbye" to preservatives, spicy strip industry is still "sunrise"
One wave has not settled, another wave has risen. An "identity crisis" put Pingjiang Laotiao into trouble again.
In December 2019, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued Announcement No. 56 "On Strengthening the Quality and Safety Supervision of Seasoned Noodle Products", clearly regulating the “spicy noodles” food under the production license category of “convenient food (seasoned noodle products)” .
Zhang Yudong told reporters that Announcement No. 56 classified spicy noodles as seasoned noodles and regarded spicy noodles as the main food, while the previous local standard for "Extruded Pastries" was classified according to snacks. The difference is that after the staple food is included, the spicy strips are not allowed to add any preservatives, while the snacks can be reasonably added.
It is not easy to "say goodbye" to preservatives thoroughly. Nearly 40 of Pingjiang’s 126 spicy tiao enterprises have failed to meet the new standards. There are also new problems after reaching the standard.
Xu Wanghui, president of Pingjiang County Food Industry Association, told reporters that considering the logistics cycle and shelf life of spicy strips, the shelf life of spicy strips should be about six months. If no preservatives are added, it can only be guaranteed for two to four months at most, and lead to a higher return rate.
A person in charge of a spicy strip enterprise in Pingjiang told reporters that the air in Hunan is humid. In order to adapt to the new standards, each workshop has added seven or eight dehumidifiers, which is expected to increase the cost of 1 million yuan each year. At the same time, because of faster mildew, the dealer return rate increased from 5% to 8%, and some dealers simply did not want the goods.
Under the new standard, we must keep pace with the times and get rid of the "identity crisis". "This is our second breakout." Zhang Yudong suggested that spicy tiao enterprises should further improve the environmental and sanitary standards of the production workshop and strictly control the quality of raw materials. Methods such as chain transportation and freezer placement can cope with the shortened shelf life."
"With a scale of more than 50 billion yuan, the six stability and six guarantees also include spicy sticks." Wu Lianzhong said, "The 22-year-old spicy stick industry is still a sunrise industry. I believe Pingjiang spicy sticks can continue to break through!"