Foie Gras, Cheese, Caviar: Would You Still Buy Them If They Were Made in China?

These surprising Chinese-made products are quietly changing the restaurant business in China and across Asia.

China is the world's third-largest producer of fatty liver and home to Asia's largest caviar farms. These Western delicacies, long thought of as imports, now carry a "Made in China" label.

To put it more plainly: the foie gras you eat in a high-end French restaurant (we will explain shortly why that is not quite the right name) or the caviar on your plate may well be a domestic product in French dress. We are not trying to spoil your dinner. We want to tell you that these Chinese-made products are quietly changing the restaurant business in China and across Asia. Western restaurants are part of that, of course, but so are Chinese and Japanese restaurants, along with a growing number of individual shoppers in the retail market.

There is something else you may not know. "Made in China" here does not simply mean foreign companies moving factories to China or setting up joint ventures, although we will describe several such cases in detail. It also points to something more interesting: some Chinese people are trying to make "Western ingredients" such as cheese at home.

This is an intriguing paradox. People's interest in and reverence for these ingredients is usually tied, to some degree, to where they come from. Think of phrases like "French foie gras" and "Spanish ham". If the story can be traced back to the founding of some little-known estate, the food becomes all the more alluring. Food, after all, is not like other manufactured goods. It is usually refined and handed down over generations and is closely bound up with handcraft, so it is hard to imagine it being easily copied.

Now everything comes back to "Made in China". Once these ingredients lose their place of origin, will they keep their charm? Or, to put it another way, how can Chinese-made "Western ingredients" win more people's trust?

Let us start with foie gras. In France, more than 98% of foie gras is in fact duck liver. This oddly pronounced word refers to the liver of a goose or duck raised by force-feeding, and the most accurate translation is "fatty liver". Euralis is an agricultural company founded in France in 1936 as a cooperative. One of its subsidiaries, Rougie, is among the world's largest fatty-liver brands: Rougie makes 30% of the foie gras eaten in Europe and 35% of that eaten in North America.

China's ban on poultry imports led Rougie to move its production here outright. Rougie's Lianyungang base was among the cooperation agreements signed during French President François Hollande's 2013 visit to China. The local government backed the project: it helped meet foreign-investment targets, and the exchange of Sino-French culinary traditions gave an economic project some cultural polish.

Rougie had been processing fatty liver at a plant in Yanqing, on the outskirts of Beijing, since 2008, but four years later a snowstorm destroyed the plant. On September 17, 2014, Rougie invested 108 million yuan to build two new bases in Lianyungang, Jiangsu, giving it a China network of a production center (Lianyungang), a distribution center (Shanghai) and a sales center (Beijing). The first phase of the breeding and force-feeding base in Lianyungang's Ganyu District can raise 1 million ducks a year, and the slaughter and processing base in Lianyungang can produce 500 tonnes a year. It is one of Rougie's three production and processing bases worldwide (France, Canada and China), and its capacity in China already exceeds that in North America. China now consumes 1,000 tonnes of fatty liver a year, and Rougie hopes to raise its share of the Chinese market from 8% today to 50%.

Now to caviar. In 2014, a single company supplied 20% of the world's caviar. It is Kaluga, a Sino-American joint venture founded in 2003. The company now supplies six kinds of caviar and also sells sturgeon meat.

Kaluga's farm is in the Qiandao Lake area of Zhejiang and covers 200,000 square meters. It won a fishery production license there by promising to bring in water-recirculating, self-purifying technology. Wild sturgeon caviar is almost impossible to get, and most of the world's sturgeon is now farmed on land, in tanks inside factory buildings, which makes water treatment especially demanding. Qiandao Lake, by contrast, is a national first-class water source: forest covers 87% of the area, there is no industrial or agricultural pollution, and the water is clear to a depth of more than 7 meters, close to the conditions wild sturgeon live in. Kaluga's processing base is in Quzhou, at the source of the Qiantang River, which also has high-quality water. Kaluga first sent its core technical staff to Europe to learn processing, then hired processors from Iran and Russia with decades of experience to train its workers.

These two companies are only the biggest of many fatty-liver and caviar producers; brands of every size also hold up this market. China claims to have more sturgeon species than any other country, and in 2006 a sturgeon farm in Hubei harvested its first batch of caviar, about 1,000 pounds.

To serve the domestic market better, these transplanted ingredients have had to adapt to local conditions.

Besides importing fry from the Caspian Sea, Russia and the Heilongjiang (Amur) River, Kaluga has bred a sturgeon found only in China, the Hai Borui sturgeon. It is a cross between a female Kaluga sturgeon (Huso dauricus) and a male Amur sturgeon (Acipenser schrenckii), both native to the Heilongjiang basin. In body size, egg count and egg quality it comes very close to the Kaluga sturgeon, and it adapts well to China's farming waters.

The ducks at Rougie's China plant are the product of several generations of selection by its research and development center. Female Peking ducks are artificially crossed with male French Barbary ducks, and each adult duck weighs 5.5 kilograms, three to four times or more the weight of an ordinary duck. Rougie ships the male and female "parent" and "grandparent" ducks from France and does the breeding and rearing in China.

Lou Ruibiao, general manager of Yibosite Trading Co., told QDaily that the caviar he distributes comes from the northeast, where Heilongjiang borders Russia and the two share connected waters. The ecology there is essentially the same as Russia's, so the quality of the catch is more reliable. Brands such as Jilin Zhengfang foie gras, which has French investment, also come from the northeast.

The plainest advantages of local production are usually low cost and freshness.

Lou says the domestic Western ingredients he handles can be 50% or more cheaper than imports. They now make up about 20% of his company's business, a share that keeps rising, and their sales grow 20%-30% a year.

Rougie can ship a batch of fatty liver every week; products made in Lianyungang travel by cold chain to Shanghai and are distributed from there across China. Fatty liver is best within 48 hours. China cannot yet fully manage that, but the individually quick frozen (IQF) packing technology Rougie has invested in keeps the product as fresh and intact as possible.

Kaluga's caviar is salted, processed, quick-frozen and packed within 20 minutes of being taken from the fish. A quick price comparison: a 50g tin of Russian sturgeon (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii) caviar costs US$235 (about 1,456 yuan) at the online store of Petrossian, the famous caviar house founded in Paris in 1904, while the same type of caviar retails for 888 yuan at Kaluga's online store.

Compared with these large companies, which come with advanced technology built in, the people trying to redefine Western ingredients in China are doing something else entirely. They are often little-known small brands. What they sell is no longer the story of the ingredient itself; it has to be a new variety, or a "new story" built through local development.

In 2006, the writer Cao Zhenyi had the idea of making a Chinese air-dried ham that could be eaten raw. She was moved by frustration with China's long-standing crude, extensive approach to farming. Ham was a case in point: China has a long history of ham-making and many varieties, yet ham remains just another ordinary farm by-product. Unlike Italian or Spanish ham, it has not built on refined products to become a national calling card.

Chinese ham production is concentrated in Guizhou, where the average summer temperature is 17 degrees Celsius, cooler than Spain, so the hams have to be warmed for natural air-drying to work. Spanish pigs are also smaller, and a Spanish ham weighs about 18 jin (about 9 kilograms), while a Chinese ham can weigh 27-35 jin, and the largest as much as 60 jin. The meat is thicker, which makes drying harder: the ham has to cure fast enough while its water content is kept from getting too high.

Before the factory started up, Cao did her homework on theory and technique. Ham-making at home and abroad is split into many "schools". She sorted hams into three systems: hams for soup (such as Jinhua ham), hams for stir-frying (such as Xuanwei ham from Yunnan) and hams for eating raw (such as Italy's Parma ham). She developed all three at once, so her products suit Western ways of eating and also fit into Chinese cooking.

Liu Yang also came to the trade from outside. He fell in love with cheese as a student in France, and in 2009 he founded his own brand, which arguably makes him the first Chinese person to open a French-style artisanal cheese workshop in China.

QDaily has reported on the steady rise in Chinese demand for cheese in recent years. Cheese sold at retail is almost all imported, and locally made European-style artisanal cheese is still a blank.

The character of an artisanal cheese depends on its maker; human control decides its flavor. Although the steps are broadly similar, both the method and the source of the milk make a difference. Because artisanal cheese can be brought to market "at almost any stage of the making process", it can tolerate more variation than cheese made in factory batches.

The signature product of Liu Yang's Bule Cheese is called "Beijing Grey". Its aroma is somewhat like that of the famous French camembert, but it tastes more strongly of lactic acid, has a milder ammonia note and is tarter overall. It shares camembert's typical ammonia note and translucent, gel-like rind, but cheese made with Inner Mongolian milk comes out whiter, while cheese made with Beijing milk comes out springier. "Beijing Grey" should therefore be seen as a cheese in its own right rather than a Chinese copy of a classic variety.

Oysters are a similar case. Water conditions and farming techniques in China fall short of some famous foreign oyster regions. So Chen Hanzong, Shenzhen's "Oyster Master", runs a production and processing base at Honghai Beach in Shanwei. Besides his signature "golden oysters" (sold as semi-dried oysters, sun-dried for more than ten hours, and fully dried oysters, sun-dried for more than ten days), he has gradually introduced an adapted "raw oyster" at his own oyster restaurants: the oysters are steamed and then chilled on ice. The restaurants also suggest Western wine and whisky pairings for each oyster dish. He supplies star-rated hotels in China as well and offers high-end off-site catering.

Chen's ultimate goal is to bring Chinese oyster production up to the refined standards of foreign producers and to replace the traditional crude, high-volume way of farming.

These high-end domestic ingredients plainly end up in upscale hotels and restaurants. Rougie sees China as the world's largest food-service market, and its core targets include more than 1,500 four- and five-star hotels in China's major cities. To promote its products, Rougie keeps a full-time "gourmet ambassador" in each market, all of them professional chefs. Along with selling, they visit customers' restaurants to demonstrate the product and help develop Chinese and Western dishes built around fatty liver.

Even Bule Cheese, which deliberately limits its output to just 300-400 kilograms a month, already appears on the cheese platters of several high-end hotels and Western restaurants in Beijing, places that usually count local sourcing as a selling point.

The Peninsula Shanghai has used Kaluga's caviar since it opened. Its choice of local supply has also spread to the Hong Kong flagship: two of the caviars now appear on the menu of The Peninsula Hong Kong. From the end of 2014, the hotel began promoting a series of caviar dishes across its restaurants.

The Peninsula has its own packaging made for the caviar, and its Lobby lounge serves a caviar afternoon tea with champagne, accompanied by blinis, crème fraîche and the traditional garnishes. 2014 was also set to bring the first caviar harvest in the ten years since farming of the Kaluga sturgeon began.

According to the hotel, the Kaluga sturgeon caviar it has chosen is light, soft and rich in color and taste; the Russian caviar is mellow with a nutty flavor; and the Schrenck's sturgeon caviar has a creamy smoothness. Sir Elly's serves Osetra caviar with king crab and abalone, and with egg, watercress and cucumber; the Chinese restaurant Yi Long Court serves black caviar with shrimp-paste sashimi dumplings; and the hotel has introduced a large 100g tin of caviar for guests to take away. Besides caviar, the Peninsula's truffles, morels and foie gras also come from China, and it has had red wine made to order by China's Grace Vineyard.

The Peninsula's approach shows how flexible these domestically produced foreign ingredients can be, especially in Chinese cooking. That is also how they can break out of the narrow business of supplying Western restaurants and reach a much broader market.

In retail, e-commerce platforms are an important base. Kaluga has its own pages on Tmall, JD.com and other sites.

Half the sales of Cao Zhenyi's Taigei Ham go through its Taobao store, and half the sales of Liu Yang's Bule Cheese also come from individual customers; the Bule Cheese stall turns up every week at the Beijing Organic Farmers' Market and at similar artisanal-food events. In an earlier article, I noted that these handmade-food brands, which lean heavily on the internet, use Weibo, WeChat and similar platforms for highly interactive promotion, mostly to build a brand image or to promote the way of life an ingredient stands for. Cao writes poems for her ham; Liu introduces cheese recipes on cooking shows and organizes workshop visits and cheese classes. These paths are entirely different from those of the large B2B manufacturers.

Beyond domestic businesses and individual customers, the next step for these domestic ingredients could be the far larger world market. Only 10% of the caviar Kaluga produces is now sold in China; the other 90% is exported to countries such as the United States, France and even Russia, caviar's original home. "From domestic sales to exports" may be the more tempting future for these China-made "Western ingredients".