Case Show: How to Seek Innovation in Traditional Food Memory ——Richard Gong，Founder，Secret Valley Amy Wong, Food Writer/Food & Culture Consultant, ADM

1. Case Show: How to Seek Innovation in Traditional Food Memory
——Richard Gong，Founder，Secret Valley
Amy Wong, Food Writer/Food & Culture Consultant, ADM
My topic today is “how to seek innovation in traditional food memories”. It is a
very difficult topic. First of all, what is innovation? For me, the story might begin
with why I am engaged in the food industry.
Before I began to work in the food industry, what I did had nothing to do with
food. I once did some design work, and speaking of why I would like to be
engaged in the food industry, it was totally out of my pursuit for the memories. I
believe traditional handicraft is a way of expressing lifestyle and a pursuit of

2. traditions and what we are doing is to innovate the culture of traditional food.
My story with food came from the sour plum. It was a product made in 2011.
Traditional Chinese red is taken as the packaging color and sold to target
customers in the form of raw materials. For this product, the sour plum soup
needs to be boiled manually. After being soaked for two hours till the soup was
boiled with big fire, it is then boiled with small fire. It takes three hours to make
the sour soup from preparing to the completion of the product. I hope that
through such process, people can slow down from the fast-paced life. Customers
can prepare such an innovative drink for themselves or their families to
strengthen communication with people around. In 2014, I used the sweet-
scented osmanthus as the raw material to make the sweet-scented osmanthus
sugar, and in 2015, I made the pure lotus root starch. All these continue my
personal memory and are very regional. I mainly use some common ingredients
in Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions. Another product is a brown sugar ginger tea, in
which we use a different material ratio to make it have a unique taste, and the
packaging is also different from the block of sugar with a tea bag. In the search
for original food taste, we often wonder what traditional food means in our lives.
Delicious, memory, warmth, hometown or culture? We want to grasp all these
points, but we currently focus on changing the culture. We want to tap the
meaning traditional cultures gives to food and make it express a different
thought. This is my understanding of food innovation.

3. Then, as outsiders of the food industry, how do we use cultural innovation in
traditional food to seek memories? I will share my journey to seek the root of
traditional food with three specific products as the case.
Speaking of the sour plum soup, it is my first product, and how does it come? In
the summer of 2011, I cooked sour plum soup every day, and my friends would
also come to me to drink the sour plum soup because they liked it. They also
asked whether I could help prepare such a drink because they also wanted to
share it with their families. Therefore, I began to wonder how to make such a
product. In the beginning, a lot of my friends also made sour plum soup
according to what I told them to do, but the sour plum soup they made was not
as delicious as mine. What on earth was the reason? They told me their specific
process of making it and consequently I found that everyone had different ways

4. to make the soup. Therefore, I realized that there must be a standard method.
But the fact is that customers usually did not read the instructions when they got
the products and on the contrary, I wanted them to read it carefully, so I decided
to write the instructions with the brush in the beginning. I had not practiced the
calligraphy since childhood, but I boldly and willfully wrote it every day, about
dozens of copies every day. My customers were very tolerant with me. They did
not say that my writings were not good-looking, instead, they said it was my
unique writing. What touched me very much was that some customers even
mounted up and hanged the instructions on the wall after they bought the
product. There was another customer, who took the instruction to the pharmacy
and asked the pharmacists there to make the sour plum soup raw materials
according to the instruction. They were all what I would like to express- to make
products with the warmth of manual labor. After they are accepted by customers,
the feedbacks will also make me feel very warm. In the beginning, I worked alone
on the sour plum soup, but in the next year when the sales gradually rose to a
good level, I would hardly write the instruction alone, so I asked a movable
printing master in Rui’an, Wenzhou to make a board and then I would produce
the instruction in the way of rubbing because I think this is a good way to
continue my manual warmth. Besides, each rubbed sour plum soup instruction is
different and unique.

5. The second product is sweet-scented osmanthus sugar syrup. In 2012, after the
sour plum soup was produced, I met Master Shen, who had been processing
sweet-scented osmanthus for more than 50 years. Before I met him, it was hardly
to find a good-tasting sauce or brewed beverage with sweet-scented osmanthus
as the raw materials on the market. Therefore, I could not buy similar products
produced in Guangxi. Although the color was very beautiful, the taste still greatly
deviated from what I had imagined. Engaged in processing sweet-scented
osmanthus for 50 years, Master Shen was very familiar with the process of sweet-
scented osmanthus, but what he made was just a food raw material and an
additive used in some traditional pastries, such as the fillings of Beijing Dao
Xiang Cun or additives of Tianjin fried dough twist. An ancestral ancient law was
used as the way of processing sweet-scented osmanthus, so I too great curiosity
in this matter and learned from Master Shen for several years about how to make
sweet-scented osmanthus products. Besides, according to my understanding of
sweet-scented osmanthus, including some memories, I made another product -
sweet-scented osmanthus sugar syrup. Why did I think of representing sweet-
scented osmanthus with sugar syrup? In fact, I occasionally read the “Beauty
Lingering between Lips”, which talked about the flower sugar syrup made in the
Qing Dynasty. Therefore, I got the idea of making sweet-scented osmanthus
sugar syrup.

6. The third product I would like to talk is the lotus root starch, which is also a
traditional handmade food. Speaking of traditional handicraft, we have to talk
about modern machinery. I once thought they were two things contrary to each
other until I went to different producing areas and countries. Particularly, after I
went to Japan, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, I saw that a lot of factories were
actually making some very traditional food in some traditional ways. For example,
a matcha processing enterprise sophisticatedly transformed the modern
machinery to simulate the handmade tea-making process. For example, bamboo
is used on the tea-baking barrel to replace metals so that these teas are well
taken care of in a relatively warm way. The equipment has been used for 30 years
and the bamboo has not changed so that the aroma of tea is well absorbed.
Therefore, we tried to find some of such processing enterprises in China and
luckily, we found it, thus giving birth to our lotus root starch. Lotus root starch is
a very traditional food that I could only eat when I was sick during childhood
because it could not easily be bought, particularly in Shanghai. The lotus root
starch in my memory is basically the West Lake lotus root starch in the iron tank.
During childhood, when I wanted to each lotus root starch, I would search such
lotus root starch, but most lotus root starch in the supermarket now is instant
and dissolved lotus root starch and it is hard to find the pleasure brought by
pure lotus root starch during childhood because it was a reward that I could not
eat anytime and anywhere.

7. However, it is hard to buy such a product on the market now, so I began to seek
lotus root starch. I visited Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Hubei and some other traditional lotus
root starch producing areas in China and finally selected a factory in Hubei to
help us complete the customization of lotus root starch. In most cases,
processing enterprises will use some scraps to produce lotus root starch and
then the final lotus root starch is a little bit gray. But this factory uses the
branches of lotus root, which is a very high grade. There was a small episode.
When I asked the factory to implement my order, the boss of the enterprise said
because of the weather, it was too late. Once it is warm, the freshness of raw
materials cannot be guaranteed because the lotus root starch will soon get
rotten, which will directly affect the lotus root starch quality, so he rejected my
order. But for me, everything was ready, including marketing and package
printing except for the lotus root starch. Therefore, as an outsider, I gave him a

8. bold suggestion: was it possible to produce it with the lotus root? He said it was
hard to say because he did not know how the product quality would be in this
way, what the production rate would be and whether the cost could be
controlled. After a night of discussion, he told me they could try it and how much
it would cost. I was surprised when I heard the cost because it was several times
higher than that of the lotus root starch processed with small lotus branches. I
did not know whether I could sell the products to customers at a higher price, so
we did a risky thing. But the result was unexpected. All the indicators testing the
lotus root starch were very good and Chairman of the Lotus Root Starch
Association also highly praised the product. Because different from the majority
of instant lotus root starch, our lotus root starch was pink, crystal and clear with a
slight smell of lotus root.
As a new comer in the food industry, I do not know how to process food, but I
only make food according to my memories of food. Actually, we have a lot of
things totally different from large enterprises who move forward and innovate in
science and technology. On the contrary, we move backward to the source of
food taste and the origin of memory itself. But I think these two pints do not
conflict because in these several projects, we get the experience that we need to
use not only raw materials, but also modern technologies to control each node

9. with people so as to make products superior to those on the market. The lotus
root starch is a precedent, and we hope there will be more like-minded fellow
peers in the future.