People who make food flavours in China all carry one uncomfortable fact: a lot of natural flavour materials have to be imported. It is not that they cannot be made here — it is that they are not made well enough. The aroma is a little off, the batches a little unsteady, the figures not pretty enough, and the downstream side would rather pay more for foreign material. That situation cannot be changed by slogans. Someone has to work through it plant by plant, variety by variety, until the figures match, the aroma stands up and the batches hold steady — only then will the downstream side dare to switch. XuMei started its natural flavour materials business in 2007 with a mission written plainly: "striving for the R&D and production of high-quality natural flavour materials for China". Headquarters is in Minhang, Shanghai; the business integrates R&D, production and sales, carried by three things: a frontier ideal, an advanced R&D platform, and complete production facilities. None of those three can be built quickly — and neither can the matter of domestically produced natural flavour materials itself.

The business has four lines. Tea concentrates, for tea beverages and related foods. Natural extraction, flavour and fragrance materials extracted from natural raw materials — the line where the company's technical route is most concentrated. Sweet flavours, for desserts, bakery, confectionery and dairy. Savoury flavours, for savoury foods, seasonings and meat products. What we entered is the most upstream: supplying natural aroma materials and extracts to these lines. There is one precondition here that cannot be fudged — the material we make is made against the imported grade, not a "domestic make-do version". For the same variety, whatever the purity, residue, colour and aroma fidelity of the imported material are, we make to that. Only when that is achieved can the downstream side switch without a psychological burden. Saying it sounds like a remark made in pique; doing it is real work — equipment to modify, parameters to tune, raw material to select, none of it skippable.

The consensus between the two companies comes from both doing something that does not pay off quickly. Making high-quality domestic natural flavour materials means heavy investment, slow results and no short-term profit — the same money put elsewhere would come back much faster. But if nobody does it, this piece stays in other people's hands: they set the price, they set the delivery date, and if supply is cut you simply wait. XuMei accepts that mission and so do we: the aromatic crops on these hills in Guangxi, thirty years of work, were never only about selling material — they were about "being able to make these tastes ourselves". This kind of thing cannot be hurried and is not exciting, and the people doing it know exactly what they are doing. That is why talking with XuMei is effortless — no need to explain why you would spend three years on one variety, because the other side is spending three years on something else.

The cooperation began with one material: XuMei had a natural flavour material that had long depended on imports, expensive and slow to arrive, and wanted to find a domestic replacement. Two others had tried without success — most of the figures matched, but the aroma was always a little off, especially the direction it took after heating, which was not the same as the imported material. After we took it on, we broke the imported sample apart and analysed it, working against it, and went through seven or eight rounds of revision. The real hurdle was not in the figures but downstream: every figure matched, and yet XuMei's client — the brand at the end — would not accept it, on the grounds that "the imported one is what we have always used". Reasoning does not answer that kind of doubt; only evidence does. We produced an item-by-item comparison report, setting out every figure and every segment of the aroma profile of our material and the imported material side by side, and had a third party run a round of blind testing. When the results came out, that material was no longer imported, and the cost came down a notch as well.

Making natural flavour materials comes down to three difficulties in the end, and our technology turns around those three. The first difficulty is aroma completeness — whether what is extracted resembles the plant's own aroma. That rests on Living-Fragrance physical extraction, moving the plant's original aroma structure across intact by physical means rather than assembling it from foreign modification; combined with supercritical fluid extraction, low temperature throughout with no solvent entering the process, so the most heat-sensitive part survives. The second difficulty is batch stability — whether this year's batch can be the same as last year's. That rests on dynamic multi-stage counter-current extraction pulling the actives out cleanly and shortening the time under heat, plus a record kept of every parameter and a sample kept of every batch, so that when variation appears you can find which link caused it. The third difficulty is controllable cost — natural material is expensive to begin with, and if the dosage is high the client cannot carry it. That rests on aroma concentration enriching the actives so that usage is small and performance steady; where higher purity is needed, molecular distillation presses impurities down once more, combined with controlled release so the aroma lasts longer and the actual dosage can come down further.

On supply, stocking of replacement varieties is scheduled against the client's import cycle — where once there was a wait for shipping and customs clearance, now there is only a wait for our tank, and delivery time moved from being counted in months to being counted in weeks. New varieties are not forced in either: a small batch is run through the client's line first, and only once it runs smoothly is it scaled up, so the client does not carry the risk. Service is straightforward too: the item-by-item comparison report between our material and the imported material goes to the client to show downstream; where downstream raises doubts, we go along to talk about the technology ourselves rather than leaving it to others. Working together long enough, when XuMei hits a difficult problem they simply call, with no procedure to go through — trust like that is worth more than anything.

For the years ahead, what the two sides need to do together is clear: work through the replaceable varieties one by one, complete the natural aroma materials that go with the tea concentrate line, and make the natural materials for the sweet and savoury lines steadier. In this industry somebody has to make the material at home. What XuMei is doing and what we are doing are two ends of the same thing.

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