Chinese take their food seriously. Whether a simple pork-filled dumpling or a bowl of delicate shark fin soup, there are right and wrong ways of preparation—and diners at home, in a restaurant, or at a streetside stand rarely hesitate to complain about a dish that doesn't measure up.
Given the importance of a refined palate in Chinese society, it seems a bit incredible that anyone would consider eating the local equivalent of TV dinners. For generations, the only acceptable alternatives to home-cooked food, made with fresh ingredients purchased from a neighborhood market, have been to eat at a restaurant, noodle shop, or buy a quick snack from a streetside vendor.
No longer. A working wife (or husband) can now make a complete family dinner, simple or sumptuous, within half an hour after reaching home. Want entrees of stewed beef, diced chicken with vegetables, and sweet and sour boneless pork? No problem. Thanks to the frozen convenience foods now on the market, all that is needed is a pot of boiling water. Just drop in the foil bag of food for about ten minutes, remove, open, and serve. (So far, complete frozen meals in the TV-dinner style so familiar in the United States have not caught on in Taiwan.) Other entree items, such as flour dumplings, scallion pancakes, cuttlefish balls, fried rice, and noodles, are even easier to prepare.
But why this sudden popularity? Has acquiring a palate finely attuned to the nuances of China's regional cuisine become less important? No, and yes. Eating great-tasting food is still a high priority for everyone, but social changes have put many urbanites into a serious time crunch that makes compromise on flavor more acceptable. It is increasingly common, for example, for both husband and wife to hold full-time jobs. It is difficult to work all day, fight the heavy traffic first to a market, then home, and finally begin cooking. By this time, enthusiasm about cooking is starting to wane. After all, one reason Chinese food is so superb is that it is labor-intensive. The ingredients and spices for each dish require complicated preparation: chopping, mincing, slicing, marinating, and more. As a result, a quick reach into the freezer for a few packages of food is becoming a popular alternative.
According to The Chinese Frozen Foods Year Book, the 1990 ROC per capita consumption of all frozen foods was still rather low-just over 6 kilos, of which one-third is convenience food. Compared with 51 kilos per capita consumption in the United States, and 11 kilos in Japan, the local market has been barely tapped. But the popularity of easy-to-prepare food is growing along with the increase in the number of double-income families, young unmarrieds, and senior citizens in the population. These people are less inclined to spend the time and effort needed for preparing home-cooked food.
The first frozen foods to gain popularity were old favorites such as rice dumplings which require a good deal of time to prepare. Convenience food still accounts for 90 percent of the domestic market. Packaged vegetables, meats, and seafood have been slower starters. "Until recently, it was common to think that only surplus foods, not fresh, needed to be frozen for sale," says Jamin Wang (王正明), marketing director of Laurel Enterprises Corp., a leading manufacturer of frozen foods.
Laurel started business in 1970 with only six employees. "The products at that time included only few items such as fish and shrimp dumplings for hot pot cooking," Wang says. "To build up our reputation, we first sold directly to hot pot restaurants. Later, we turned to retailers, but many of them were reluctant to carry our products because they wanted to reserve the space in their freezers for popular products like ice cream and other frozen snack foods."
The market expanded as people became more willing to pay extra for the convenience and flexibility frozen foods gave to their daily planning. "Our per capita GNP was only around US$l,000 a couple of decades ago," Wang says. "When it broke US$3,500 in the mid-eighties, the frozen food industry took off." Per capita GNP is now expected to reach US$10,000 by the end of 1992.
Sign of the times—changing dietary habits have made flour-based products more popular. The government recently sponsored a Frozen Rice Food Festival to encourage greater consumption of Taiwan's traditional starch.
Another impetus to the industry came in 1983, according to Chen Chien-pin (陳建斌), a specialist at the Council of Agriculture, when McDonald's became the first international fast-food restaurant chain to hit the island. "McDonald's has successfully changed our dietary habits," says Chen, who also teaches food science at Fu Jen Catholic University. Menu items, including french fries and hamburgers, were made and frozen in the company's central kitchen by two local frozen food manufacturers. They were then delivered to the company's outlets throughout the island. "That model inspired further development of the frozen food industry," he says.
At about the same time, there was also a sudden growth in the number of large supermarkets and 24-hour convenience stores (there are now an estimated three thousand islandwide). These stores carry a higher proportion of frozen foods than do most other places, and the sales volume is tremendous. For example, each day Chi Mei Co. provides the island's 7-Eleven stores with more than 40,000 frozen paotzu (a meat-filled bun which is steamed before eating).
A new epoch began for the industry in 1989, when leading manufacturers such as Laurel, President, Wei-Chuan, Goody, and Ajinomoto all expanded their production facilities, and purchased over four hundred delivery trucks to distribute their products. "So far business has grown 400 percent in the past five years," Chen says. According to figures in The Chinese Frozen Foods Yearbook, 1992, the previous year's production of frozen convenience food for domestic consumption was US$198 million.
The top selling frozen food products, according to 1991 statistics from the Council of Agriculture, are pork dumplings, pork and chive dumplings, scallion cakes, crisp fried shrimp, sesame stuffed bun, meat and potato patties, hamburger patties, milkfish balls (for hot pot cooking), pork stuffed buns, and chicken nuggets. Few of these are designed for baking. Most homes do not have ovens because Chinese cooking does not require baking.
Dumplings have a huge sales volume: more than 10 million a day. But new products are also catching the shoppers' attention. Laurel's latest item, for example, is a small rice dumpling which is extraordinarily simple to prepare. "Just pour boiling water on them, and they're ready to eat," Chen Chien-pin says. "It's a fast, delicious, and inexpensive snack." The product has only been on the market since May, and daily sales are already around ten thousand boxes.
Another product line that is gaining popularity is a series of five classic Chinese entrees being marketed by Ajinomoto, a joint Chinese-Japanese company. Favorites such as stewed beef, diced chicken with assorted vegetables, and sweet and sour boneless pork have been prepared following recipes by the well-known Chinese food expert and cookbook author, Fu Pei-mei (傅培梅). The cooking bag containing the frozen food is put directly in boiling water for ten minutes, then opened and served.
Baking may be gaining in popularity. The rise in disposable income and fall in import duties have made microwave ovens more popular (now owned by an estimated 30 percent of the island's households), and some frozen food companies are targeting this market. Locally, microwave ovens are still used primarily for defrosting or heating up leftovers instead of cooking. This will no doubt change as people gain more experience—and have more product choices. Some local food companies are already importing more American and Japanese microwave food items, such as popcorn, pizza, and fruit pies. Nevertheless, many people feel that however tasty these frozen foods may be, they still lack that home-cooked touch.
Convenience, not cost, is important hot pot meals include small amounts of numerous vegetables. It's easier to eat out or buy the ingredients prepackaged and frozen rather than shop for each item.
Whatever their feelings about taste differences, urbanites are clearly embracing the convenience of frozen foods. Distribution profiles seem to bear this out, because the market response to frozen foods follows Taiwan's urbanization pattern. According to statistics gathered by the Laurel food company, 55 percent of its products are sold in the northern sector of the island (including Taipei and its suburbs with a population approaching 6 million), 22 percent in the middle of the island; and the rest in the south. But urbanites are not the only consumers concerned about saving time. According to a report by the Council of Agriculture's Chinese Frozen Food Institute, convenience food consumption is also increasing in smaller towns like Yunlin, Taitung, Ilan, and even the remote islands of Kinmen (Quemoy) and Penghu.
If frozen foods gain in popularity, it may be a boon for local farmers. "We hope to establish more outlets for local agricultural products," says Chen Chien-pin. One way to boost sales is to guarantee quality, which was not easy when the frozen food industry began. A major problem was temperature control of products from the time they were frozen until they were thawed out by consumers at home. Frozen food has a shelf life of a year if it stays at -18°C along each step of production, distribution, and display. Keeping the cold chain unbroken requires sophisticated equipment, from delivery trucks to market refrigerators, and this business infrastructure has been developing rapidly.
To boost implementation of product reliability further, in 1989 the Council of Agriculture and the Department of Health successfully initiated the Chinese Agricultural Standard (CAS) Mark System for frozen products made from local agricultural products. Those manufacturers that meet the strict CAS requirements are entitled to print the mark on their packages.
Although it is a recent program, consumers and businessmen already recognize the CAS mark to be a symbol of quality. Chen points out that 90 percent of locally made frozen foods for the domestic market—270 items produced by twenty-five companies—use the mark. "TV advertisements have contributed a lot to acceptance of the mark," Chen says. To ensure that this hard-earned credibility doesn't thaw out, the Chinese Frozen Food Institute has been commissioned to oversee and implement the system, and the private-sector Food Industry Development Institute has responsibility for inspecting CAS products and manufacturing facilities. Funding for the program is not a problem. "CAS companies handsomely fund the system and other promotion campaigns as well," Chen says. "Their support almost matches what the government budgets."
Automation is also changing the face of the industry, ensuring product consistency as well as saving on labor costs in Taiwan's extremely tight market. Laurel's fish dumpling operation is an example. When the company first started, the dumplings were made by hand. An employee could roll out eight to nine thousand dumpling wrappers per day. "At that time we had around fourteen employees producing this item," Jamin Wang says. About eight years ago, Laurel began a four-year automation program. Today, its daily output of the same style dumpling is 1.2 million, "but the number of workers on the production line is about the same," Wang says.
Greater sales bring problems as well as profits. For example, most of the flour—the major ingredient for dumplings—is imported, which seems to go against the grain of the government's policy to promote greater consumption of locally grown rice. So, why not use more rice, especially since Taiwan has huge stockpiles of it? (The annual production of rice is around 1.8 million metric tons.) Additional R & D on rice-based frozen foods may help, but Wang points out another cost problem: "One kilo of rice costs US$1," he says, "while a kilo of flour costs only four cents."
The government has responded by promoting greater consumption of rice. For example, a "Frozen Rice Foods is Festival" was held in May 1991 by the Chinese Frozen Food Institute in twenty-seven leading supermarkets in the Taipei area. Thirty-six new items were displayed by CAS producers. The products included sticky rice, fried rice, and rice rolls. To emphasize the historical and cultural importance of rice to the Chinese diet, the market displays included Chinese lanterns and other traditional decorative motifs.
Some promoters were disappointed with the results. "Except for the sticky rice dumplings, sales during the festival were unsatisfactory," says Yin Li-shan (殷立山), manager of the Minchuan store in the Kasumi supermarket chain. The Council of Agriculture's Chen Chien-pin is more upbeat: "If any of them sold one-tenth the number of flour dumplings, it was an achievement. I don't think people should expect success right after products are put on the market."
Whether or not frozen rice products will gain greater popularity remains to be seen, but the overall prospects for the frozen food industry look very good indeed. As long as people's incomes increase, and there are growing numbers of double-income families and young unmarrieds, frozen foods will be an important alternative in the kitchen. "It's quality and convenience rather than price that concern the consumers," Chen says.