Manufacturing in China

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China Huiyuan Juice Group Limited

I had the opportunity to visit Huiyuan Juice today, one of the largest juice manufacturers in China. It started out as a small privately owned enterprise and today has over $350 million in revenues. The manufacturing facility was about an hour (with traffic) outside of downtown Beijing, not too far from the airport. I’ll warn you in advance that if you’re not interested in manufacturing you may find this entry boring.

As we drove in to the complex (and it really was a complex) the first thing that struck me was how neat and orderly everything appeared. The site was huge! It houses 11 Tetra-pak lines and 12 PET lines. We were met by our tour guide and went inside. We had a brief overview of the manufacturing process and then saw two production lines. The Tetra-pak processing operations looked very familiar to me, as did their packaging operations. I saw a lot of equipment that I have come across working in manufacturing before. The PET line was new to me as it had a plastic bottle blow molding part and then the bottles were sanitized twice before being filled. The PET manufacturing process is completely aseptic.

There was very little labored being employed to run these lines. The lines also seemed highly efficient. What was interesting about the sections of the factory we saw was that there was no electric lighting being used. The roof of the plant had a narrow skylight running down the center of it and provided enough natural light for the operations. A very ingenious design to promote energy savings.

This site is also the company headquarters. They have about 300 employees at HQ, 600 in the plant and about 10,000 total employees across China. The company is listed on the Hong Kong exchange. Huiyuan has about 50% of the juice and nectar market in China.

We then met with the Vice President of the company, Matthew Gene Mouw. He’s an American who came to China in 1981 as a college exchange student and has essentially been there since. He gave us a great overview of the company’s history, recent financial performance, customer segments they target and compete in and an overview of their competition.

Overall it was amazing to see food manufacturing operations in China, especially for what is a very well known brand in the eastern part of the country. I was surprised that they allowed us to take pictures. I’ve posted some of them here.

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Photos

The company had its own museum!
It showcased the history of the firm, how it\'s grown, etc. It had a heavey emphasis on its mission, vision and values and how it lives them.

Notice the use of ISO9001 and HACCP.
This is a not a backwards manufacturing company.