Delicious mi-chien (蜜餞), or preserved fruit, have been a favorite snack food in China for centuries. They include everything from plums, Chinese dates, and apricots to olives, grapes, and orange peels. These are processed into salty, sweet, or sour delicacies using an. enormous array of condiments, herbal preparations, and wines. Some styles even combine these flavors, producing treats guaranteed to intrigue and captivate the palate.
In earlier years, small-scale family operations accounted for the bulk of mi-chien production in Taiwan. Advanced techniques and sales strategies were of little importance. What counted most were marketing persistence and the secret recipes that gave the products their distinctive tastes. In fact, almost anyone with an entrepreneurial flair could carve out a niche in the business. Thus, few major manufacturers emerged, and small operators, many of whom only occasionally produced for the market, set the pace.
Given the lack of resources and the short-term outlook of most producers, packaging and the development of brand names understandably received little attention. The prepared fruit was in most cases simply marketed to retailers in bulk lots. These merchants then dispensed mi-chien to customers from large plastic or glass canisters, often wrapping individual purchases in pieces of newspaper or putting them in unlabeled plastic bags.
But Taiwan's rapid economic development in the last two decades and the growing affluence of its population brought change to many industries, including the producers of preserved fruit. The appearance of Western-style supermarkets and convenience stores and a growing consumer demand for more hygienic, sanitary food products forced producers to upgrade their quality and pay more attention to packaging and brand name identity. In most cases, it was no longer possible to succeed by marketing generic, unpackaged processed fruit.
In order to gain access to the swiftly increasing number of modern retail outlets and to pump more vitality into their sales, mi-chien producers embraced up-market packaging. Initially, most of them affixed labels complete with product description and brand names to plastic bags. The system was especially economical and convenient for small-scale producers, who tended to market limited amounts of various preserved fruit. They could process or purchase just a small quantity of a given fruit, have an appropriate label printed, and then wholesale the product to outlets all over the island.
The labels created by such newly brand-conscious marketers sought to capitalize on an age-old affection for preserved fruit. Besides the drawn-out pleasures of the snack gourmet's slow chewing of a sticky plum or prolonged sucking on a salty olive seed, preserved fruit have psychological appeal. The continuing popularity of mi-chien is at least in part a widespread desire to recapture some of the flavor of earlier times when life was more tranquil and pleasures simpler. Almost every adult in Taiwan's bustling urban areas associates preserved fruit with the joys of their rural or small town childhood years. In those days, as now, even a small bag of wine-soaked plums or dried kumquat was a special treat. And today, children of all ages, rural and urban, find the huge selection of mi-chien a standard source of daily snacks.
As an authentically Chinese product, preserved fruit are also representative of China's long and glorious culinary tradition, and producers have drawn on this history by using readily recognizable motifs from the Chinese past, including flora and fauna, for their packaging. Some processors have even gone one step further in this quest to identify with nature and Chinese tradition. It is common to find many mi-chien labels claiming that the product has been prepared in "Hong Kong style" or that it was actually manufactured in that city. According to one industry insider, the latter assertion leaves something to be desired as far as accuracy is concerned. He notes that it almost invariably represents an attempt to link the product more closely to traditional China, with Hong Kong serving as a proxy for the Mainland.
Whatever the effectiveness of such packaging claims, the success of classical art motifs has been enduring. As Hsiao Kuo-chi, the manager of Shun Tai, one of the island's leading producers of preserved fruit notes, "People see our product as one that is intertwined with their heritage, and they seem to favor traditional motifs in package art. We've tried to introduce more contemporary, Western-oriented designs over the years, but they have never been as successful as the conventional cultural standbys."
This label preference has helped make contemporary preserved fruit packaging a repository for archetypal Chinese design. Colorful bags of the products from a multitude of companies fill the shelves and display racks of supermarkets and other retail outlets. Dragons promoting kumquats and phoenix pushing dried plums compete feverishly for consumer attention with characters such as the God of Longevity. Other packages utilizing quaint representations of fruit in classical settings serve as reminders that mi-chien is a not-to-be-forgotten part of Chinese food culture.
It is, in fact, no exaggeration to say that the literally thousands of mi-chien bags currently found in the Taiwan marketplace offer a dynamic new medium for the preservation of folk and classical design. At a time when traditions are disappearing in so many aspects of life on the island, the motifs of antiquity have managed to find a new home in the commercial world. The circumstances may be something less than ideal from the standpoint of art critics or historians, but at least traditional designs are being applied in lively and functional ways, rather than being relegated to musty folk art collections.
Despite the popularity of these highly successful glue-on labels, they will probably be replaced within the next few years because of changes in the labor market and economic necessity. In fact, a shortage of labor and the need for greater economy of scale are already forcing larger mi-chien companies to employ automation and preprinted plastic packaging. Placing preserved fruit into bags by hand is time-consuming, sticky, unpleasant work, and many companies are finding it difficult to hire workers for such a task. According to Hsiao, whose company has the only fully automated mi-chien packaging operation on the island, "The problem of obtaining workers to do the necessary packaging work has forced us to automate and turn to preprinted packaging. "
From the standpoint of the traditionalist, the growing use of preprinted packaging is likely to be a mixed blessing. The increase in surface area available for design readily lends itself to Western-style package art. Many artists are apt to embrace designs more in line with international trends rather than continuing to reproduce traditional motifs, which typically feature a great deal of detail and the crowding together of decorative elements.
Such change, however, will probably avoid a wholesale rejection of the designs currently in use. The level of public acceptance of these old favorites is simply too high. Instead, aficionados of mi-rhipn label art can look forward to seeing more full-package designs that present traditional themes in a modified Western format. Abstract splashes of color are already becoming popular, and there is a definite trend toward less ornate design work. Some label artists are even beginning to develop what appear to be modern cartoon versions of characters from classical folklore, hoping to appeal to the children who consume large quantities of preserved fruit.
Preprinted packaging, with its enhanced opportunities for artistic expression, will undoubtedly lead to more creativity and help eradicate a chronic problem with the unauthorized reproduction of established labels. As more original designs appear, producers tempted to knock off a competitor's label will find the practice less than rewarding because of increased consumer brand awareness and copyright restrictions.
In the final analysis, whatever packaging method and design are employed to present the product, almost all of the firms in the mi-chien processing industry seem destined to enjoy continued prosperity. Sales are steady, and their delicious products are still pleasing palates today as they have done for generations.