Bullfrog Became an Internet-Famous Dish. Where Do All Those Frogs Come From?

Restaurants are selling more bullfrog than ever, but the supply chain behind it has barely changed.

Hardly anyone plays Travel Frog anymore, but bullfrog dishes, which caught on at the same time, have not cooled off.

Meituan data shows that the number of bullfrog-specialty restaurants nationwide has grown by roughly 10% a year for the past three years. As of February 2018 there were more than 22,000 of them across the country, up 2,691 from the same month in 2017 and up 4,443 from the same month in 2016. The number keeps climbing. According to Baidu Index, once crayfish passed its summer peak, searches for bullfrog overtook searches for crayfish.

The Meituan Catering Report 2018 shows that more and more restaurants are building their reputation on a single dish — bullfrog, crayfish, pickled-cabbage fish — and that every one of those single-dish categories has produced its own signature brands.

The texture of the meat also means bullfrog has begun turning up in every kind of cuisine, even Jiangsu-Zhejiang cooking. Ma Xiaoyan, head of procurement at Wangxiangyuan, told QDaily that the whole market now uses far more bullfrog than it did a few years ago.

No dish has to be made with bullfrog, but cuisines that never used it before seem able to slot it in anyway. Dry-pot bullfrog, spicy bullfrog and pickled-pepper bullfrog are the best sellers on food-delivery platforms; the double-layer copper-pot bullfrog has pulled in plenty of traffic on Douyin. Any of them would work just as well with a different ingredient — and restaurants usually offer one, to cushion the cost increases that come with swings in the bullfrog price.

The growth shows up most clearly in delivery data. Ele.me says that from January to July 2018, bullfrog orders across the platform rose 41% month over month, while the number of merchants selling it rose 30%. Lunch and dinner accounted for more than 77% of a day's bullfrog orders, with another 13.6% placed during late-night snack hours.

Companies that used to make semi-prepared crayfish have turned to bullfrog as well. Xinliangji started developing a thaw-and-eat bullfrog product in mid-2017. MissFresh's microwaveable dry-pot bullfrog went into mass production this past May. Wangxiangyuan began selling a semi-prepared version of its signature Overlord Frog on Tmall and JD.com this year, and it sells better than anything except the fish head.

There are more bullfrog restaurants now. But the supply side has seen nothing like the frenzy around crayfish.

As It Turns Out, Neither Diners Nor Restaurant Owners Care Much Where Bullfrogs Come From, or What Breed They Are

Where do bullfrogs come from? Asked that, the owner of Wa La Wa La answered first: "From the wet market." She doesn't talk about growing regions the way people do with crayfish or hairy crab. All she knows is that the frogs are farmed somewhere in the south.

Wa La Wa La has four locations in Beijing. Each store gets through about 300 jin of bullfrog a day (roughly 150 kilograms) on weekends and more than 200 jin on weekdays, the owner told QDaily. "We've used the same suppliers for years, and it all comes through Dayang Road. The bullfrogs are all farmed in the south," she said.

The store nearest the Dayang Road seafood market buys straight from the market; for the one farther away, a wholesaler picks out the frogs at the market and delivers them. "Either way it's the same. That's just how bullfrog works," she said.

Extra middleman or not, the price the store pays has climbed for two years running. "It went from 7 or 8 yuan a jin to 11 or 12, and in August it hit 16 or 17 yuan a jin."

Every morning, wholesalers at the seafood market sort and pack the frogs and truck them to the store. Rather than dwell on where they came from, she would rather stress that the store kills them to order: "Every store has someone whose only job is butchering bullfrogs."

Almost all of Beijing's wholesale seafood moves through the Dayang Road market. Walk in and the first thing you notice is that bullfrog still isn't a hot category. Of the market's hundred-plus stalls, only two sell bullfrog exclusively; most of the rest advertise breakout items like crayfish and hairy crab, or everyday fish such as snakehead and catfish.

With crayfish and hairy crab, people think not only about the growing region but about the water the animals grew up in. Black gills or white gills is one of the selling points: you can see at a glance whether a crayfish was raised in clean water, and the white-gilled ones fetch more.

But how do you judge a bullfrog? Does a heavy one taste better, or a light one? No large chain has grown out of the bullfrog business — so far only one bullfrog brand, Jingyuerong, has claimed a strategic investment of 100 million yuan. The restaurant industry hasn't even begun building an image around bullfrog as an ingredient.

No restaurant advertises where it buys its frogs, and diners can barely tell the breeds apart.

"A lot of people take the name meiwa literally — a beautiful frog, a bullfrog that happens to look nice. In fact meiwa is a different species: smaller, with more tender meat," said Liu Jin, brand manager at the chain Zhouxiaoyu, in an interview with QDaily. Zhouxiaoyu was incubated by Wuweiyuan, a chain built on chuanchuanxiang skewer hot pot, as a new brand devoted to meiwa fish head. "The meiwa fish-head category has only just taken off. There's a dry-pot version and a clear-broth version. We started out in chuanchuanxiang, and the data shows not many places in Chengdu do clear-broth frog, so that's an advantage for us."

What matters more than a single unified supplier is how long it takes a frog to get from the knife to the table.

"Eating frog is mostly eating muscle, and there's a particular component in it that only lasts about two hours." Zhouxiaoyu now has several dozen restaurants across Sichuan, all supplied from sources inside the province, with different suppliers delivering to whichever restaurants are closest.

Most chains work this way: find suppliers nearby, cook frogs killed fresh. To absorb higher raw-material prices in summer, they widen the menu and adjust the restaurant's profit mix.

On delivery platforms the most-ordered bullfrog dishes are dry-pot, pickled-pepper and spicy. What they share is heavy seasoning.

One trend in Chinese dining these past few years is the appetite for rich, chili-led flavors, and bullfrog fits it. When one bullfrog restaurant takes off, a crowd of imitators follows — nothing unusual there. Crayfish and Chaoshan beef hot pot ran the same course.

On Ghost Street, Beijing's busiest late-night strip, only about 20% of restaurants put bullfrog on their signs, but nearly all of them have added a bullfrog dish to their house specialties.

These are all aquatic products, yet while people have a clear enough sense of where the good crayfish and hairy crab come from, almost nobody can say which region grows the best-tasting bullfrog.

Some of that comes down to the history of bullfrog farming in China. The frogs were brought over from Cuba in 1965, but they weren't successfully domesticated and farmed at scale until the 1980s — well after people in Jiangsu started eating crayfish, and nowhere near as long ago as crab.

Most Bullfrogs Come From Farms in the South, and Exactly Where Shifts With Environmental Policy

For bullfrog farming, climate is the deciding condition: once the weather turns cold, the frogs hibernate and the growing cycle stretches out.

In the warmer provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, farmers can raise two crops a year. In East China and the southwest they get only one. That is why bullfrog production sits in the south.

But the boom in bullfrog restaurants has not given the old farming areas a chance to invest and expand, because raising bullfrogs pollutes water badly. In Zhejiang, the "Five Water Co-Governance" campaign has torn down large numbers of bullfrog farms since it began two years ago. Since the start of 2018, Sanming, Longyan and other parts of Fujian have been urging farmers to dismantle their bullfrog greenhouses voluntarily as part of a pollution cleanup, with townships flatly banning any new, expanded or rebuilt bullfrog farm and pushing farmers into other trades.

Both are hot single-dish categories, but crayfish and bullfrog strain their supply chains in different places.

"Time is the crayfish's enemy," said Duan Defeng, who farms crayfish in Xuyi. Losses between the water and the table run high. "Under 5% mortality, you have no grounds to complain — you just have to live with it." In hot weather the loss rate can easily top 10%. "And then there's no profit left."

"Crayfish trading nationwide is pretty loosely organized. The season peaks in summer, and unlike crab, crayfish die easily the longer they're out of the water, which puts enormous demands on logistics. For small-batch customers, running trucks with water tanks, refrigeration and misting costs too much; and if you ship in volume without a proven holding-tank setup at the other end, whatever doesn't sell there dies," Dong Peineng, director of the Xuyi Crayfish Association, once told QDaily.

For bullfrog the biggest enemy isn't transport loss but temperature. "Ship ten bullfrogs, how many arrive alive? You might end up with eleven, who knows," joked Mr. Wan, a bullfrog wholesaler at the Jingshen Seafood Market. "In transit they're not like fish or shrimp. They're pretty hardy."

Summer supply used to be plentiful. This year Zhouxiaoyu, which buys in Beijing and Sichuan, found demand outrunning it, because more restaurants have entered the category while the number of farmers has barely grown.

Yao Lijian, who runs the Wawo brand and its 50-plus stores across East China, doesn't think bullfrog is short yet, though he has seen prices rise too. This past summer Wawo also paid 16 yuan a jin. "Prices are low in winter and high in summer. Once the temperature drops, the price drops with it."

The curve looks much the same every year. It's just that this year's peak ran about 10% above last year's.

"Prices go up in summer because bullfrogs need a tropical environment to grow. At that time of year they put on a lot of weight in a single day, so farmers hold them a couple of extra days to add more. That brief tightness pushes prices up, and heat-related transport losses are part of it too. In winter the frogs grow slowly, so farmers just want them out the door, and the price comes down." Wawo's buying price has recently fallen to 8 yuan a jin.

"Bullfrog had a boom more than a decade ago too, even before crayfish. But back then it was late-night food. Then it faded." Wawo now has fifty stores, with charcoal-grilled bullfrog as the headline dish.

Each one gets through six or seven hundred jin of bullfrog a day, mostly from Anhui, Jiangxi, Fujian and Guangdong — which are also the main producing regions.

Price swings hit Mr. Tuhao harder. He sells straight to consumers through a Taobao shop whose flagship product is spicy rabbit head, and five years ago he started cooking bullfrog the same way. Most of his bullfrog buyers are repeat customers. This summer, with the price climbing and freshness a worry, he suspended sales.

In October he put bullfrog back on the shop, but the raw price didn't fall with the temperature. To move volume he made it a discount item; with live frogs still costing 17 or 18 yuan a jin, two portions for 39.9 yuan with free shipping loses money. He counts it as a necessary investment in a niche market he believes in: "We plan to spend three months getting the shop's bullfrog sales up to 10,000 yuan a day."

But No Industry Chain Like Crayfish's Has Formed — It's Still Feed Companies Plus Farmers

Bullfrog prices didn't start swinging this year.

Before 2014, Taizhou in Zhejiang was the biggest producer for the East China market, while farming in Hunan and Hubei, Anhui and Jiangxi was scattered. After Zhejiang's Five Water Co-Governance policy took effect in 2014, Taizhou farmers moved in numbers to Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan and Hubei, where the farmed area at one point topped 10,000 mu. Guangdong expanded sharply that same year, and in 2015 the price collapsed to as little as 2 or 3 yuan a jin, wiping out most farmers' money for the year.

China still has no large-scale bullfrog farming base. Production is almost entirely small household operations, and the national market is organized around a "feed mill plus company" model.

The biggest cost in raising bullfrogs is feed. Once a frog grows from tadpole to juvenile, the saying goes, it takes a jin of feed for a jin of frog. Feed companies work with farmers roughly the way a cooperative does: the company signs up designated farmers, sells them feed, then buys the whole crop back when the frogs are ready and distributes it nationwide.

Wangxiangyuan gets through 5,000 to 6,000 jin of bullfrog a day, and its Overlord Frog is ordered more than any dish except the fish head. Ma Xiaoyan, its head of procurement, told QDaily that a few big feed companies in Guangdong and Fujian control more than half the national bullfrog market. Wangxiangyuan buys mainly by keeping relationships with those large feed companies, which handle the orders and then deliver to its stores nationwide from the nearest source.

Even the two main frog-buying feed companies she named are not big. Guangbao Feed, based in Zhangzhou, Fujian, describes itself in a job posting as a 500-person company. Yuanxin, based in Guangdong, has annual feed capacity of only 200,000 tons — and that includes feed for other kinds of farming.

Many of the counties and towns where bullfrog farming clusters have launched campaigns against bullfrog-farming pollution. That is one reason raw bullfrog got more expensive this summer, and it may also be the opening for remaking the supply chain: if farming has to be large-scale and low-pollution, the existing company-plus-farmer cooperative clearly can't cope. The industry has started looking at cleaner methods, such as raising frogs in rice paddies, and Wangxiangyuan is preparing to build a base of its own to take control further upstream. All of that is still only a plan.

For now the main producing regions are still Guangdong and Fujian, which sell frogs from August through May of the following year. That leaves the East China market a window of just two or three months, between May and July.

Since the start of 2018, many places in Fujian, Guangdong and elsewhere have closed bullfrog farms to protect local waters, while new sites have gone up at the same time — so the total has actually grown from last year. But for live frogs, unstable prices and unstable output remain the hardest problems.

Search Taobao or 1688 for bullfrog or frozen bullfrog and the goods mostly originate in Fujian and Guangzhou, though they ship from all over the country.

Mr. Wu, who owns Chenggong Fresh, says his business is mainly offline wholesale, most of it to local hotels and some to supermarkets, with online sales a small slice. His supply comes chiefly from Guangdong and Fujian. "Frozen supply is steadier than live, and the important thing is stocking up during the season when the frogs are coming out," he told QDaily.

He has sold frozen bullfrog for several years. Looking at his local market in Shijiazhuang, Mr. Wu thinks the real limit is distribution: his shop sells a few hundred jin a month, and 90% of it still goes through channels like hotels.

Frozen bullfrog tastes far worse than freshly killed, and the supply chain has only just begun to change at the source.

Xinliangji started planning semi-prepared bullfrog products in 2017. Like crayfish, bullfrog is farmed seasonally. From a restaurant's side, live frogs yield little meat — usually two jin of frog for one jin of net meat — and grown frogs cost a lot to keep alive, with high losses; processing them also means paying someone to do nothing but butcher. When live prices rise, margins get squeezed hard. Set against fresh frogs, the price of semi-prepared or whole frozen bullfrog holds steadier, and on the numbers the semi-prepared version works out cheaper too.

The technical difficulty in making semi-prepared bullfrog lies in water retention and freezing. Xinliangji sells its version mainly to restaurants and other business customers.

MissFresh launched a ready-to-eat dry-pot bullfrog this past May, edible after two minutes in the microwave. It works with local suppliers to process live frogs where they are raised, then moves them to consumers through its own end-to-end cold chain.

Since March, Wangxiangyuan has sold a semi-prepared Overlord Frog through Tmall, JD.com and similar channels, with the seasoning controlled by a central kitchen. "Going from fresh to frozen, the drop in taste is still pretty obvious," Ma Xiaoyan said. "Compared with what we sell online, the stores use 100% freshly killed bullfrog — under an hour from knife to table — so it tastes better."

Consultants for the popular bullfrog franchise programs tell prospective franchisees the same thing: frogs killed fresh taste better. The company trains them in its marinade and helps find suppliers near the restaurant, rather than shipping frozen, semi-prepared frogs from headquarters.

The push in recent years to standardize Chinese food and build central kitchens has, in this category, standardized the seasoning rather than the frog.

Whether bullfrog's supply chain ever goes through a shake-up like crayfish's still depends on whether it can keep making you want to eat it.

Cover image from Mr. Tuhao