1. Why Beijing's Food Processing Must Be Read Differently

Agricultural and sideline food processing usually evokes the kind of sector that grows up next to raw materials in grain- and livestock-rich provinces: mill flour where wheat is grown, slaughter and cut where pigs are raised, low value-added but high in volume, consumed locally. Apply that logic to Beijing and almost nothing fits.

Beijing is neither a major grain province nor a hog-raising heartland; local farm inputs are sharply limited. Yet it is a mega-city of more than twenty million people who must eat every day, one of the largest food consumption markets in the country. That makes Beijing's food processing, from the very start, not a sector "pushed by raw materials" but one "pulled by demand and underwritten by supply security." Its core problem is not how to absorb a local surplus of farm produce, but how to keep this city steadily, safely and decently fed with grain, oil, meat and milk.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute treats Beijing's food processing as a regional case precisely because of its anomaly. It shows how a mega-city poor in raw materials uses the organizing power of state-owned groups, a roster of time-honored houses with centuries of history, and the policy line of feeding the capital to turn a seemingly low-end sector into a different form that wins on brand, standard and distribution. This article endorses no company's market performance; it simply lays out the real landscape and honestly notes the transition and pressures it is going through.

2. Shounong and Ersheng: The Base Held by Two State-Owned Groups

To understand Beijing's food processing, one cannot bypass two names: Shounong Food Group and Ersheng Group.

Shounong Food Group is a large Beijing municipal state-owned agriculture-and-food enterprise as old as New China, spanning farming, fishing, food processing and trade and logistics, with total assets exceeding 180 billion yuan, about 162 billion yuan of operating revenue in 2023, and nearly 60,000 employees, controlling two listed companies, Sanyuan Foods and Jingliang Holdings. Its most distinctive asset is a cluster of time-honored houses: by its own disclosure the group holds 16 Chinese time-honored brands including Wangzhihe, Liubiju, Yueshengzhai, Sanyuan, Guchuan and Dahongmen, plus several Beijing-level old brands and national intangible cultural heritage items. These old brands are the deepest reserve of Beijing's food processing.

The Ersheng line holds the time-honored houses of condiments, pickles and meat. Its member firms hold Chinese time-honored brands such as Liubiju, Wangzhihe, Yueshengzhai and Tianyuan Sauce Garden. Liubiju, founded around the Jiajing reign of the Ming dynasty, is more than 470 years old, famed for the rich, sweet, crisp and tender flavor of its pickles; Wangzhihe, founded in the eighth year of Kangxi (1669), is known for fermented bean curd that is fine, smooth, soft and fragrant; Yueshengzhai, opened in the fortieth year of Qianlong (1775), is known for its braised beef and mutton. The crafts of Liubiju pickles, Wangzhihe fermented bean curd and Yueshengzhai braised beef and mutton are all on the national intangible cultural heritage list. That a city can turn everyday foods like pickles, bean curd and braised beef into heritage spanning centuries is itself the most distinctive face of Beijing's food processing.

The presence of these two groups defines the sector's character: it is not an assembly of thousands of grassroots workshops but a landscape organized by state-owned groups and centered on time-honored brands. Strong organizing power and deep brand heritage are its strengths; concentration in a few entities and heavy mechanisms also plant the worry that it turns less nimbly.

3. Grain-Oil and Dairy: The Two Most Solid Pieces of the Supply-Security Line

If the time-honored houses are the signboard, then grain-oil and dairy are the two ballast stones closest to "feeding the capital."

Grain and oil center on the Jingliang system and the Guchuan brand. Jingliang Group is a large state-owned enterprise funded by the Beijing municipal government; its listed company Jingliang Holdings is engaged in oils and oilseed processing, trade and food processing, with its oil-processing and trading business mainly concentrated in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Within its brand portfolio, Guchuan flour and Lübao and Gubi cooking oils are all Beijing time-honored brands, staples in the kitchens of generations of Beijingers. In a city that grows almost no wheat or oilseed, having a state grain enterprise lead the processing, reserving and circulation of flour and cooking oil effectively turns grain-and-oil supply security into an industry. This line has not been easy lately: by public reports Jingliang Holdings saw a sharp drop in 2024 net profit, with brands such as Guchuan and Lübao facing notable operating pressure, and the group arranged an internal transfer of the Guchuan trademark series, showing that even supply-security old brands must face the market's test.

Dairy is represented by Sanyuan Foods. This Shanghai-listed Beijing dairy firm makes dairy products covering low-temperature fresh milk, low-temperature yogurt, ambient milk, milk powder, cheese and ice cream, with about 7.8 billion yuan of operating revenue in 2023. Sanyuan is a textbook "city dairy" — rooted in the Beijing local market, leaning on proximity to urban consumption and on low-temperature fresh milk, a category demanding cold chain and freshness. This differs from dairy giants that push ambient milk nationwide; it buys Sanyuan a solid presence in the capital market, but it also means its growth ceiling is largely bounded by the size and demographics of the local market. The dairy sector as a whole faces an imbalance in raw-milk supply and demand, pressure on low-temperature yogurt growth, and a squeeze on infant formula from a falling birth rate, and a regional leader like Sanyuan sits within all of it.

These two pieces make the supply-security nature of Beijing's food processing clearest: they may not be the most profitable or glamorous businesses, but they are the base this city cannot do without for a single day.

4. The Dahongmen Relocation: How a City Moved Slaughtering Out

The biggest structural change in Beijing's food processing in recent years is written into three words: Dahongmen.

Dahongmen was once shorthand for Beijing meat processing. Built up from bases such as the Beijing No. 5 Meat Joint Processing Plant, the Dahongmen meat brand long carried the task of hog slaughtering and meat processing for the capital, a key link in the pork on Beijing tables. But hog slaughtering and meat processing are classic operations that take much land and water and place heavy demands on the urban environment; for a mega-city bent on relieving non-capital functions and where land is precious, keeping large-scale slaughtering in the city grew increasingly out of place.

So this line chose relocation and cross-region layout. Ersheng's meat group and partners in Hebei jointly built and operate Dahongmen Food Co. in Anping, Hebei, placing hog slaughtering, cut-meat production, cold storage, logistics distribution and by-product deep processing in Hebei; on the farming-and-processing side the group also laid out tech ranching in places such as Chicheng, Hebei, with an annual slaughter volume nearing ten million head and several plants rated national standardized hog-slaughtering demonstration plants. This means Beijing's pork supply chain has moved its most land-hungry, heavy-asset slaughtering link to the periphery, keeping brand, standard, distribution and the retail end in the city.

The significance is more than one firm moving a plant. It is a microcosm of the changing logic of Beijing's food processing as a whole: this city no longer seeks to "complete all processing in the city," but, following Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordination, relocates heavy processing to the periphery and keeps for itself the higher value-added, environment-friendlier parts. Dahongmen's turn from "slaughtering pigs in Beijing" to "slaughtering in Hebei and supplying meat to Beijing" is the plainest footnote to this logic.

5. From Slaughtering to Central Kitchens: What the In-City End Is Doing

With heavy processing moved out, the end that stays in the city is growing a new form: central kitchens, prepared vegetables and cold-chain distribution.

As chain dining, group catering and food delivery expand in Beijing, a new mode of processing matters more and more: food enterprises set up independent central kitchens that centrally produce prepared vegetables, semi-finished and finished dishes, then cold-chain them to their own chain outlets or group-dining units. Beijing has a clear regulatory definition and on-site inspection requirements for central kitchens, requiring dedicated rooms for cooling, packing and cutting of directly-edible perishable food and full-time food-safety managers — the strictness itself reflects how sensitive this city is to food safety. Notably, under national policy, the prepared vegetables, semi-finished and finished dishes a central kitchen makes for its own outlets must meet catering food-safety rules and standards and are not classed as prepared dishes, a distinction that keeps clarifying the sector's boundary.

This end differs entirely in character from traditional food processing. The traditional end competes on the ability to slaughter, cut and mill raw materials into basic ingredients; the central-kitchen end competes on proximity to urban consumption, further processing ingredients into prepared vegetables and finished dishes, and delivering them precisely to outlets and canteens by cold chain. Its customers are not distant wholesale markets but the dense web of chain restaurants, office canteens and communities across the city. In a sense, the center of gravity of Beijing's food processing is shifting from "upstream primary processing" to "downstream deep processing and distribution" — heavy outside the city, refined within it, the new division of labor after the shift.

For sales teams supplying food-processing firms — whether providing flour, cooking oil, raw meat or dairy inputs, or offering cutting, milling, filling, cold-chain and full-set central-kitchen equipment — to reach at scale the grain-oil, meat, dairy and prepared-vegetable processing factory customers of Beijing, you can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter, along the two dimensions of region and industry, the factory directory and decision-maker contacts of Beijing's agricultural and sideline food processing industry, turning upstream customer development from scattered inquiry into reading off a map.

6. The Institute's View: A Shortfall in Raw Materials, Offset by Organization and Brand

Drawing the threads together, Beijing's food processing takes a shape quite unlike a grain-rich province. It does not rely on local raw materials or on tonnage; it stands on three things. First, the organizing power of the two state-owned groups, Shounong and Ersheng, which gather grain-oil, meat, dairy and condiments into one game. Second, a dozen-odd Chinese time-honored houses spanning centuries — Wangzhihe, Liubiju, Yueshengzhai, Guchuan, Sanyuan — turning brand into a moat hard to copy elsewhere. Third, the policy line of feeding the capital, which keeps the sector run at the height of "this city must eat steadily."

Its shortfalls are equally clear. The innate scarcity of raw materials means Beijing can hardly compete on the volume of upstream primary processing with grain and livestock provinces; concentration in a few state-owned entities and heavy mechanisms make it turn slowly amid market swings, so that even an old brand like Guchuan must face operating pressure; a city dairy like Sanyuan has its growth ceiling bounded by the local market's size and demographics.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's view is this: the real interest of Beijing's food processing lies not in how high output can climb, but in whether it can keep offsetting the "shortfall in raw materials" with the "strengths of organization and brand" — whether Dahongmen, after relocating, can make the brand-standard-distribution end worth more than before; whether the new form of central kitchens and prepared-vegetable delivery can catch the demand of chain dining and group catering and grow into the new mainstay of in-city processing; whether old signboards like Guchuan and Sanyuan can, beyond their supply-security duty, recover the vitality that makes a younger generation willing to pay. These questions share no single answer, yet together they decide whether this city that eats much and grows little can keep making food processing a case that wins on brand, standard and supply-security capability, rather than an old sector relieved away. How a city eats often says more about the weight of this sector than how much grain it produces.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Beijing agricultural and sideline food processing factory directory and industry data)
  • Beijing Shounong Food Group official site, Beijing Municipal State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, The Paper: Shounong's asset scale, 2023 revenue, headcount, list of Chinese time-honored brands and listed companies
  • Beijing Ersheng Group public materials, Wikipedia, Xinhua, Beijing Daily: time-honored houses held by Ersheng — Liubiju, Wangzhihe, Yueshengzhai, Tianyuan Sauce Garden — their founding dates, craft features and national intangible cultural heritage status
  • Beijing Ersheng Meat Food Group, Hebei Department of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs designated-slaughter enterprise list: formation of the Ersheng meat group, the joint-venture Dahongmen Food Co. in Anping, Hebei, Chicheng tech ranching and annual slaughter volume
  • Jingliang Group public materials, Jufeng Finance, Oilcn, Tencent News: Jingliang Holdings' main business, Guchuan flour and Lübao and Gubi cooking oils, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei oil-processing layout and recent operating changes
  • Beijing Sanyuan Foods 2023 annual report, Beijing News: Sanyuan's 2023 revenue, dairy product mix and city-dairy characteristics
  • Capital Window (Beijing municipal government portal), Xinhua: Beijing food-business licensing and central-kitchen regulatory definition, on-site inspection and dedicated-room requirements, and the policy distinction between prepared dishes and central kitchens
  • China Food Industry Association, Henan Daily client: 2023 national agricultural and sideline food processing revenue and profit share of the food industry as background data