"Deep processing of agricultural products" sounds like something out of a policy document, but doing it is very concrete: what comes out of the field has skin and shell, earthy and raw notes, and turning it into food that can go into a supermarket, keep for half a year and still taste good is the work. Panpan started in Jinjiang, Fujian, in 1996, formerly Jinjiang Fuyuan Food, and grew into a national key leading enterprise in agricultural industrialisation, now with 12,000 employees and seventeen large production bases spread across Fujian, Shandong, Henan, Sichuan and Hubei. The business has four lines — bakery, snacks, beverages and export: cakes, bread, Swiss rolls, extruded foods, potato chips, biscuits, milk beverages, fruit juice. In 2020, Panpan became the official packaged snack sponsor of the Beijing Winter Olympics and Winter Paralympics — an identity that is not a billboard but a threshold.

What does a threshold mean? It means the standard is the highest tier: pesticide residues, contaminants, heavy metals and microbiology, every item held to the strictest level. It means every batch has to be traceable backwards — from finished product to raw material to plot. And it means the documents have to be complete, so that whatever is asked for can be produced. What we supply to Panpan is the natural aroma materials for the bakery, extrusion and milk beverage lines. A client that came up through agricultural products looks at material differently from others: they do not ask first whether it smells good, they ask "where did this come from". That question suits our road exactly — which plot, which grower, which day it was picked, all recorded, all producible.

The two companies have similar temperaments and both believe in the word "honest". Panpan's core culture is "integrity first, quality above all", and its founder has received a national "Star of Integrity" award; on our side there are no fine words, just thirty years of "doing what we said we would do". Honest means: what is written on the specification is what it is, no games with wording; the delivery date is the day we said, no fobbing off with "about"; and when something goes wrong and it is ours, we do not push it away. Business people in Jinjiang value honesty, and people in our mountains work with honesty too. A relationship like that is not tiring to conduct, because neither side has to guard against the other.

The cooperation began with a bakery product: the client said the aroma was not natural enough and that you could taste "flavouring". The first thing we did on taking it on was to look at the formulation — the problem was not in the material but in the dosage and the pairing. The real hurdle was on the production line: the same aroma type performed completely differently on the bakery and extrusion lines. Bakery is long time, medium temperature, slow baking, and the aroma has to hold up throughout; extrusion is instantaneous high temperature and high pressure, where the aroma either escapes entirely at that moment or is pressed out of shape. The first version of the material was fine on the bakery line and changed character the moment it came off the extrusion line, the sweet note turning burnt. Later we made two specifications: a bakery version that holds under long heating, and an extrusion version that gets through that instant of high temperature, using molecular distillation to cut different boiling ranges and adjusting the degree of concentration. Each line using its own — that was how the problem was solved.

Talking about technology is clearest by working backwards from "supplying the Olympics". First, the natural character has to stand up — the documents have to prove it, and that rests on supercritical fluid extraction, low temperature throughout with no solvent entering the process: the process route is itself the answer, no extra explanation needed. Second, fidelity has to be high — the aroma has to smell like the real thing, and that rests on Living-Fragrance physical extraction, moving the plant's original aroma structure across intact by physical means, not assembling the taste from foreign modification. Third, purity and colour have to pass — few impurities, light colour — and that rests on molecular distillation pressing down the heavy boiling components and pigments. Fourth, the dosage has to be small — the more added, the more comes along with it, and the greater the risk — and that rests on aroma concentration enriching the actives so that less is added and still enough. Fifth, traceability throughout — from raw material entering the plant to finished product leaving it, every step keeps a record and a physical sample is kept, so any batch with a problem can be traced backwards. Those five were not prepared specially for the Olympics; they are what we do every day. It is only on an occasion like that that not one of them can be missing.

On supply, Panpan has seventeen bases and we schedule and ship by base, each plant receiving the same specification; agricultural products have a purchasing season, and we schedule to whatever the client is buying, so they never stop a line waiting for material. On service, the strictest set of standard documents is prepared in one go — whatever the event needs, whatever the client needs for export, whatever is asked for is produced; and when the client audits, we pass in one round with no rectification left hanging. When the client's people come to the plant, what they look at is not how new the equipment is, but how the raw material store is managed and how the retained-sample room is arranged — someone who looks at those two places genuinely understands quality.

For the years ahead, what the two sides need to do together is clear: hold the health-oriented line steady — after reducing oil, salt and sugar, how the aroma stands up is a question both sides have to think about together; prepare the export specifications market by market; and secure supply to the seventeen bases more firmly. Honest people doing honest work — given time, everyone sees it. Panpan has done it thirty years, and so have we.

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