“I’m Opening a Baozi Shop, But I’ll Do It Properly” | 100 People With Ideas
Baozi — about as street food as street food gets — are hard to picture as a big business. When Tong Qihua said, “I think baozi have extraordinary commercial potential,” everyone laughed. He runs the baozi chain Bao Bao, which sells more than 200,000 buns a day in Shanghai and Hangzhou.
Baozi — steamed stuffed buns — are about as street food as street food gets, and hard to picture as a big business. When Tong Qihua said, “I think baozi have extraordinary commercial potential,” everyone laughed. He runs the baozi chain Bao Bao, which sells more than 200,000 buns a day in Shanghai and Hangzhou.
Tong Qihua made up his mind to sell baozi almost six years ago. One day in 2009 he went to the Administration for Industry and Commerce to register a business, and said he wanted to open a baozi shop.
“You want to do what?” the clerk asked, more than once.
“I said I’d do it properly.” Tong Qihua, founder of the baozi brand Bao Bao, was talking to us in an office building on Wen’er Road in Hangzhou. In 2013 Bao Bao sold roughly 300 million yuan of baozi in Hangzhou, at an average price of about 2 yuan apiece. At its peak the chain opened 22 stores in a single month.
At 4:15 a.m., staff who got up at 3 arrive to open the store and start making baozi. Inside Bao Bao’s bamboo steamers, mats woven from dragon-whisker grass line the baskets and steam spirals upward.
The first basket has to come out before 6:30. The vegetable buns use huawang greens, run through an ice-water blanching system so the chopped leaves stay as green as they were when picked. The meat in the pork buns is rolled into neat, round balls; the red bean paste comes from a farm in Wenling, Zhejiang Province, and sometimes from Xinjiang.
The bun makers weigh each raw bun in their hands — 60 grams of dough, 40 grams of filling — and hold the margin of error under 2 grams. If a batch falls short of the standard, they destroy the whole batch. That once caused a shouting match at one of the shops: customers were lined up outside, and they hadn’t gotten up at dawn to wait for nothing.
Tong Qihua opened a few more outlets in those neighborhoods, but he had no intention of changing the standard process.
“In the past, people thought baozi were a pretty lowly kind of food,” he said. “But you can actually make them this precisely.” To that end he went over his ingredient standards with suppliers again and again, without tiring of it. The meat processor Jinluo agreed to cooperate and changed its production line so plastic film wouldn’t stick to the ground pork when it was frozen.
The bun makers were tested too. They were used to folding by feel, with small personal habits they assumed did no harm. Now they train for nine days at Bao Bao’s baozi school, and then have to get through a three-month store internship.
Tong Qihua suggests that anyone curious about Bao Bao go and see the “baozi school.” Since the first store opened in 2009, more than 5,000 people have passed through it, and the pass rate is not high. Work out the cost of this training system — it resembles the way Starbucks trains baristas — and it comes to about two months and roughly 10,000 yuan per bun maker. Trainees have to arrive at a new understanding of quality, process and standards, and they have to be able to fold 22 buns a minute, with the error under 2 grams throughout.
Xu Wei is a Hangzhou native and a vice president at a software company. Hangzhou eats 60 million baozi a year, and he used to account for none of them. Then he found Bao Bao, which looked cleaner than the street stalls. “I feel like it’s become part of my life,” he said. “If it were gone, I think something would be missing.”
Xu Wei has met Tong Qihua twice, and describes him as mild, low-key, smart and grounded.
Wu Min, founder of the food-startup community Shihua, agrees, and would add one more word: disciplined. Next to other entrepreneurs, Tong Qihua is more like an engineer.
Wu Min has been a Bao Bao customer since 2009, and since then, “there’s been no other choice for baozi.” She came back to China from Britain years ago, and says the first time she walked past a store, the brand name stopped her.
The English name is Bao Bao,
and the Chinese name, Ganqishi, is the opening phrase of a line from the ancient classic the Tao Te Ching: relish your food, adorn your clothing, be content in your home, delight in your customs. Something beyond baozi seemed to be at work.
Tong Qihua says it took a year of demonstrating their craft before they finally woke up a “sleeping baozi market.”
Before he opened Bao Bao in Hangzhou in 2009, Tong Qihua spent three years running a few baozi shops in Shanghai. Sales grew a good deal, but the business couldn’t keep going. He later called it a “pilot.” “Shanghai finds it hard to give you a chance — everyone was buying Western fast food,” he concluded. “I told myself: one day I’ll come back with my baozi, and I’ll be on the most mainstream commercial streets.”
Ning Xiaoxiao first tasted Bao Bao’s baozi on a rainy day.
She had come from Shanghai with the Yixi team, and was in the middle of a large meal at Hangzhou’s Zhi Wei Guan with Zheng Jie, founder of Shulan Healthcare. Zheng Jie recommended a baozi chain with more than a hundred locations in the city. “You should try it, it’s called Bao Bao, it’s really good.”
Hangzhou locals never tire of recommending Bao Bao to visitors. Ning Xiaoxiao and her colleagues ate three buns each, and decided to invite Tong Qihua to Shanghai to give a talk.
In 2013 Tong Qihua turned up at Yixi’s Shanghai event in a white shirt, peach-pink trousers and thick-framed glasses, and spoke for half an hour on the subject “A Man Who Makes Baozi.” The video drew 924,000 views on Youku, among the highest of the 297 episodes the series had posted.
This TED-like talk series, with its middle-class tastes, seemed to suit Tong Qihua better than his baozi shops did. For a long time afterward he sat in the audience at almost every episode. Yixi’s talks often ran from 1 p.m. until 7 or 8 in the evening, and he began handing out Bao Bao buns to the audience during the breaks.
Ning Xiaoxiao noticed that after that, many people who had eaten a bun once kept thinking about them — some would write on the sign-up form for the next event that they wanted baozi again. A few still remembered that when Tong Qihua first pushed back into Shanghai, he told the Yixi audience, “I think baozi have extraordinary commercial potential,” and the whole room burst out laughing.
Tong Qihua started expanding in the Shanghai market again. But Ning Xiaoxiao doesn’t think handing out buns at Yixi had anything to do with the stores in Shanghai. At that talk Tong Qihua said something else, in a calm voice, that left a deeper impression: “Just thinking about baozi makes me feel warm.”
In late November, Tong Qihua flew to the United States, planning to open a store there.
Like most of the Shanghai stores, it would be a third-generation Bao Bao. Besides vegetable and pork buns, third-generation stores also sell apple char siu and curry beef buns. Tong Qihua says these were made for younger customers, and the company has also slowed its pace of openings, spending more time developing fillings such as cheese, curry and lobster.
After 2011 Tong Qihua noticed that young people had become Bao Bao’s buyers, and that people no longer treated baozi only as breakfast — across the chain’s 165 stores, 70 percent of sales now come after 9 a.m. As for the old street-corner customers who used to eat baozi strictly for breakfast, some of them say: “Bao Bao’s buns are too refined, too delicate. I still like them a bit rougher.”
Fixed ideas about baozi may not be so easy to change. Tong Qihua chose to open his new stores next to universities — the Shanghai one beside Tongji University, his alma mater, and the American one beside Harvard. “When something needs to be overturned, it’s best to start with young people who haven’t been written into the program yet,” he said. “They can tell what a good baozi is, and they know how to respect the trade.”
True enough: these young people are keen on handmade food, even if they still lack the plainest picture of baozi that foreigners have — “everyone knows it comes from China, an old, traditional food.”
In the new stores people can take their buns and go, or come in and sit a while. At the Bao Bao on Chifeng Road in Shanghai, one customer wrote on Dianping after eating there: “Kind of feels like a MUJI-style café.”
“It feels very relaxed.” Wu Min gave a similar verdict. “Starbucks isn’t the only place you can sit anymore.” The first time she met Tong Qihua, Wu Min remembers, they slid without meaning to into talking about how traditional food was changing. Tong Qihua recalled growing up somewhere that when a relative was building a house, the family would pick out 200 baozi to carry over.
Wu Min says that six years on, Tong Qihua has found a good balance between tradition and innovation.
Tong Qihua’s own taste has changed too.
As a child he ate only pork buns; now he has “come to like” the vegetable ones. “Vegetable buns are the hardest to look after, so I eat one every day the way you’d inspect the work.”
If he can, Tong Qihua intends to “never change trades again.”
The day he decided to make baozi, he looked back on the twenty or thirty shops he had opened and closed over the years and felt “like it had all just been a game — nothing worth being sentimental about.” So he covered a map of Hangzhou with marks, set out before dawn, and walked every commercial spot on every street and alley. He kept it up for about three months and drove more than 8,000 kilometers.
Qian You, who designed the Bao Bao app, met Tong Qihua last summer, and thought the two of them were alike.
“Tong Qihua is in food, I’m in design. But we’re both people who go after quality, put it into practice and keep at it,” Qian You said. He is also the developer of the Sunmao app, seen as a piece of craftsman’s work. Before their meeting, Qian You went to Bao Bao for the first time and ate three buns and a bag of hot soy milk.
“I just wanted to see whether it really was that good.”
What Else Tong Qihua Said
Q = QDaily, T = Tong Qihua
Q: What you’re doing with baozi seems never to have been well understood. Has your own view of it changed over the years?
T: My own understanding hasn’t changed much — otherwise, back when people looked at me as if I were crazy, I might have given up. Now I’m even more certain this is what I want to do. I suppose I’ve sunk deeper and deeper into it, and dealing with baozi every day makes me feel they’re extraordinary.
Q: Did you want to prove to those people that baozi aren’t so old-fashioned and lowly after all?
T: I didn’t want to prove anything deliberately, I just wanted to concentrate on doing it well. But I think we have still touched some people, and let them know baozi can be made the way we make them now.
Q: Who actually makes the baozi at Bao Bao?
T: The people in this work have changed a lot over the years. I used to think only migrant workers would be willing to do something this hard. Now 20 percent of them are vocational-college or university graduates. They’re plain people, but serious. We also want to give them the confidence that they can make baozi in our stores for a lifetime and be provided for in old age.
Q: What’s the thinking behind where you put your stores?
T: I lean toward opening around universities. When something needs to be changed completely, the idea is best planted in young people who haven’t been written into the program yet. When I say baozi are good and someone laughs at me, that’s actually friendly — we can still explain ourselves. If someone looks down on it in his heart, that runs deep, and there’s nothing left to say.
Cover image courtesy of Bao Bao.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.