For one company to make seven completely different tastes at the same time is difficult in itself. Dali started in Quanzhou, Fujian, in 1989, and over thirty-plus years has built seven brands: Daliyuan for bakery pastries, Haochidian for biscuits, Copico for potato chips, Hi-Tiger for energy drinks, Heqizheng for herbal tea, Doubendou for soymilk, and Mei Pei Chen for short-shelf-life bread. The aromas these seven things need have almost nothing in common — custard pie wants milk and egg, potato chips want savoury and roasted notes, herbal tea wants the clean bitterness of herbs, soymilk needs the beany note held down, energy drinks want a punchy fruit character, and short-shelf-life bread wants the wheat aroma of the moment it leaves the oven. One group managing seven completely different taste lines at once, listed in Hong Kong in 2015, paying over a billion yuan in tax for years on end — behind those numbers is a very practical ability: not chasing trends, just making things well one by one.

That we can handle seven categories rests on a deep foundation of varieties and processes. The aromatic crops on these hills in Guangxi are mixed by nature, and thirty years of work has accumulated a good number of extractable varieties; on the process side all the roads are available — supercritical, Living-Fragrance physical extraction, dynamic multi-stage counter-current extraction, molecular distillation, aroma concentration — combinable as needed. So when the client wants something for bakery today and something for beverages tomorrow, we do not have to find our way from scratch. What we supply is the natural aroma materials for the bakery, biscuit, potato chip, herbal tea and soymilk lines. Do it long enough and you notice a pattern: it all looks like "adding aroma", but the difficulty of each line is different, and mixing them up is a guarantee of doing it badly.

The two companies have similar temperaments, both valuing the word "conscientious". Dali's values are written simply — "creating quality with heart", one sentence for decades; on our side there is no grand slogan either, just thirty years of doing one thing: extracting material. Being conscientious means no faking: passing off synthetic as natural is not done, last year's material is not sold as this year's, and quality is not discounted to save one process step. In mass-market food the margins are thin and the temptations many, and not many companies hold to those two words. Dali writes charitable donation into the annual budget and has set up an independent body to manage its foundation — nothing to do with us, but the attitude of a company shows: someone that serious about unrelated matters will not be casual about its own products.

The cooperation began with a new product: the client wanted to make a herbal drink more "real" — the herbal character was there, but the returning sweetness after that clean bitterness was not natural enough. The first thing we did on taking it on was to distinguish which bitterness should be there and which should not. The real hurdle came after: the client wanted to use the same aroma type in both a bakery product and a beverage, and only when it was made did it become clear that it would not work. Bakery is a high-temperature, low-moisture environment where the aroma has to hold up in the oven; a beverage is an aqueous, slightly acidic system where the aroma has to dissolve and release. The same material performed very differently in the two — the bakery version seemed dull in the beverage, and the beverage version was gone as soon as it went into the oven. In the end we simply made two versions: a heat-resistant version holding the high-temperature section, and a water-soluble version solving dissolution and release, each to its own side.

Talking about technology is clearest by short-shelf-life and long-shelf-life products. On the short-shelf-life side — Mei Pei Chen's bread, for instance, with a shelf life of a few days — what is wanted is "best at this very moment": the aroma of the oven has to burst out, and that rests on Living-Fragrance physical extraction, moving the plant's original aroma structure across intact by physical means, so the aroma is fresh and layered. Here long-term stability matters less, and the aroma can be made to open up more. On the long-shelf-life side, biscuits, potato chips and beverages sit on the shelf for over half a year, which rests on molecular distillation pressing down the easily oxidised components and unstable impurities, combined with controlled release so the aroma comes out slowly rather than bursting out in the first month; high-oil products like potato chips also have to be protected against rancidity, and supercritical fluid extraction cleans up residues so fewer hidden risks are left at the process level. Short shelf life wants "all at once"; long shelf life wants "always there" — two ways of thinking, two sets of parameters.

On supply, Dali has production bases across the country, and we schedule and ship separately by base, so nobody waits for anybody; when the raw material purchasing season comes round, we build stock ahead in line with the client's rhythm so they do not stop a line waiting for material. Service connects by business division — the bakery, beverage and snack divisions have different temperaments and different needs, so we follow them separately rather than dealing with everyone with the same speech. The client once did something we have remembered a long time: one year their R&D director came to our plant with people from several brands, not to audit but to evaluate aromas together, and afterwards left behind a page of handwritten comments.

For the years ahead, what the two sides need to do together is clear: sort out the natural aroma materials for the seven lines one by one, make the short- and long-shelf-life specifications standard items, and support the health-oriented upgrade well. In mass-market food, those two words "conscientious" are the most valuable thing — Dali has said them for over thirty years, and so have we, for thirty.

This article was published on 2026-09-14, and last updated on 2026-09-21. The article will be continuously updated.