1. Why Gansu's Food Manufacturing Must First Be Separated From Primary Processing

Food manufacturing and the primary processing of farm produce are two things often conflated yet fundamentally different. Primary processing performs the first transformation of farm output — washing potatoes into starch, slaughtering and cutting livestock, milling wheat into flour. Food manufacturing goes several steps further, turning these semi-products into finished goods a consumer can pick up directly — goods with a name, a recipe and packaging: a pre-packaged noodle ready for the pot, a bag of lily pastry fit for a supermarket shelf, a labelled bottle of olive oil. The former sells raw material; the latter sells a product.

Drawing that line gives Gansu a different angle. Gansu's primary-processing map — Dingxi's potato starch, the Pingliang and Zhangye cattle slaughter, the Hexi flour mills — is already solid, the fruit of building out the first processing step around distinctive local materials. But food manufacturing asks a harder question: can those materials be made locally into finished goods that command a price and sustain a brand, rather than being shipped out by the tonne for others to finish and brand?

Gansu's food manufacturing is precisely several pieces trying to answer that question. Each picks one thing the locality does best — Lanzhou's bowl of noodles, Lanzhou's lily, Linxia's halal beef and mutton, Longnan's olive — and pushes, with effort, the extra steps toward a finished product. This report endorses no firm's business performance; it simply lays out the real progress these finished-goods clusters have made, and honestly names the obstacle a deeply inland food province cannot skirt when it makes finished goods.

2. Lanzhou Beef Noodles: Deconstructing a Hand-Pulled Bowl Into an Industrial Finished-Goods Line

If one card must represent Gansu's food manufacturing, it is Lanzhou beef noodles.

Its scale must be stated first. According to public reports, by the end of 2024 Lanzhou beef noodle outlets at home and abroad totalled about 60,000, spread across more than 60 countries and regions, with the whole chain's annual sales revenue exceeding 60 billion yuan. But the vast majority of that 60 billion is catering revenue from bowls pulled and cooked fresh across the country — that is food service, not food manufacturing. What truly belongs to food manufacturing, and what Lanzhou has pushed hardest these past two years, is deconstructing this craft-dependent fresh-made noodle into a pre-packaged finished product that can be industrially produced and shipped in bags.

The logic of this finished-goods line is to break a bowl into standardised modules: dough cake, concentrated beef broth, semi-prepared beef seasoning, chilli oil and a dehydrated vegetable sachet, each made industrially and then combined into a pre-packaged beef noodle that can be reconstituted at home. According to public reports, Lanzhou is building a food industrial park in the Shuping area, cultivating "super factories" led by firms such as Zhongfu, whose lines, once built, can reach a daily output of 120 tonnes of dough cakes and the capacity to handle over 300,000 pre-packaged units. The point of a pre-packaged beef noodle is that Lanzhou beef noodles need no longer be delivered store by store, master chef by master chef, but become an industrial finished good that can be boxed, shipped far and sold through e-commerce and supermarkets.

Lanzhou's goal here is also clear. According to the Three-Year Action Plan for High-Quality Development of the Lanzhou Beef Noodle Industry (2024–2026), by the end of 2026 it aims for a cumulative total of more than 50 pre-packaged firms and more than 10 above-scale enterprises, pre-packaged product revenue above 10 billion yuan, and chain-wide sales revenue above 40 billion yuan. It must be said honestly that this pre-packaged system remains in an early, nurturing stage — several of the louder chain noodle brands actually originated outside the province, and capital's interest in Lanzhou's own pre-packaged firms is limited. Turning a fresh-made bowl into a genuinely durable pre-packaged product is still a climb for Lanzhou.

3. Lanzhou Lily: From Selling Fresh Lily by the Catty to a Bag of Lily Pastry and a Jar of Lily Paste

The second piece of Lanzhou's food manufacturing hides on the slopes of Qilihe and Yuzhong — the Lanzhou lily.

The Lanzhou lily is one of China's rare sweet-lily growing areas; the high-altitude cool climate of Qilihe and Yuzhong yields a quality hard to replicate elsewhere. According to public reports, in 2024 the Lanzhou lily's whole-chain output value was about 5.68 billion yuan, and the "Lanzhou Lily" regional brand value has reached the order of several billion yuan. But unlike primary-processing provinces that only sell fresh lily by weight, what Lanzhou has done with lilies these years is genuine finished-goods work.

On the finished-goods side, the approach is to push fresh lily deep into processing. According to public disclosures, the city has about 220 registered lily-processing enterprises with an annual cold-storage capacity of tens of thousands of tonnes; products have long gone beyond vacuum-packed fresh lily and dried lily, with frozen lily, lily pastry, lily paste and other product types — 18 categories in all — developed in recent years. Yuzhong has built a deep-processing lily industrial park centred on firms such as Shenguo, and Qilihe district has gathered several provincial- and municipal-level leading enterprises, with Shuangkouyuan and Shenguo among the mainstays turning fresh lily into deep-processed finished goods. The value of a bag of lily pastry or a jar of lily paste is that the Lanzhou lily is no longer fresh produce sold by the catty at the mercy of weather, but a finished good with a recipe, a shelf life and a place on the shelf.

This line plays out the logic of food manufacturing clearly: hold a material unique to the locality, first build the scale of fresh and primary dried goods, then push, with effort, toward finished goods such as frozen products, baked goods and pastes that carry recipes and added value. The Lanzhou lily grew from a seasonal fresh product into an industry of several billion yuan precisely on the strength of these finished goods.

4. Linxia's Halal Food: Turning Ethnic Character Into Exportable Finished Goods

A piece of Gansu's food manufacturing that is highly distinctive yet often overlooked outside the province is Linxia's halal food and ethnic specialty goods.

Linxia is home to several ethnic groups with a deep halal culinary tradition, and it has turned that tradition into a sizeable industry. According to public reports, Linxia prefecture has supported the development of more than 2,400 halal-food and ethnic-goods enterprises, taking initial shape as an integrated production-processing-sales structure across halal beef and mutton, dairy, beverages, farm produce and groceries; in earlier years the output of its halal-food and ethnic-goods industry had already broken through 3 billion yuan, its added value accounting for a considerable share of the local industrial economy. What it makes here is not the primary processing of slaughtering livestock and selling carcasses, but turning halal beef, mutton, dairy and groceries into packaged, distributable finished goods that meet specific dietary norms.

A further feature of Linxia's finished goods is that they naturally carry an export character. According to public reports, Linxia has more than ten foreign-trade export firms engaged in the halal industry, such as Bafang Qingheyuan, with annual exports approaching USD 20 million, serving Middle Eastern and Central Asian halal markets. In recent years it has also brought in food supply-chain firms such as Huifa — which disclosed that Huifa's Linxia food supply-chain company achieved sales revenue of about 276 million yuan in 2024 and built cooperative mechanisms with dozens of local leading enterprises and cooperatives. The moat of Linxia's halal food lies in this ethnic culinary craft, hard to replicate as a whole, plus the channels and trust oriented toward specific consumer markets. The slope it must climb is how to move from local specialty food toward more standardised, larger-scale and steadily exported modern finished-goods supply.

5. Longnan Wudu's Olive Oil: Pressing a Mediterranean Fruit Into a Local Edible-Oil Finished Good

The final piece sits on the slopes of Wudu in Longnan, starring a fruit that sounds decidedly "un-Gansu" — the olive.

The olive is a Mediterranean native, yet it found a similar climate in Longnan's Bailongjiang valley and grew into an industry of considerable scale. According to public reports, Wudu has built olive plantations of several hundred thousand mu; 2024 fresh-fruit output reached tens of thousands of tonnes; it is China's largest olive-growing area and virgin olive oil production base, with virgin oil output of about 5,700 tonnes, ranking first nationally in planting area, output and output value, with comprehensive output value exceeding 4 billion yuan. But what truly ties Wudu to food manufacturing is not the fresh fruit in the field but the processing line that presses that fruit into finished goods.

According to public disclosures, Wudu has more than ten olive-product processing factories equipped with multiple internationally advanced production lines, with a substantial daily fresh-fruit handling capacity accounting for a considerable share of the nation's olive-processing capacity; around this fruit, the locality has developed edible olive oil, olive-oil capsules and more than 80 products across ten major categories. Pressing fresh fruit into edible olive oil and making olive-oil capsules is a textbook step toward finished goods in food manufacturing — it makes Wudu's olives no longer merely a fresh-fruit material but a graded, branded edible-oil finished good fit for supermarket and e-commerce shelves. It must be said that domestically produced olive oil remains a niche category in the national edible-oil market; to get consumers to accept this bottle of oil from inland Gansu, Wudu still has much market education to do — but it has already, in real terms, planted the finished-goods step at the source.

6. Upstream Supply Chain: Four Finished-Goods Lines, Four Non-Overlapping Procurement Demands

Put the four pieces together — Lanzhou beef noodles, the Lanzhou lily, Linxia halal food, Longnan olive oil — and the shape of Gansu's food manufacturing becomes clear: there is no single dominant category, but four distinctive local materials each pushing a line toward finished goods. Because these four lines make finished goods, their upstream procurement demands split into four non-overlapping systems:

  • Dough cakes, broth, seasoning and dehydrated vegetable ingredients: the pre-packaged Lanzhou beef noodle line has concentrated, steady demand for flour, concentrated beef broth, chilli oil, compound seasonings and dehydrated vegetables, with rising requirements for recipe consistency and shelf life
  • Frozen, bakery and paste processing ingredients: the Lanzhou lily's frozen products, lily pastry and lily paste are steady buyers of sugar, fats, flour and assorted food ingredients
  • Halal beef, mutton, dairy and grocery materials: Linxia halal food has sustained, special demand for compliant meat, dairy materials, grocery ingredients and certification services
  • Edible-oil refining and filling inputs: Longnan olive oil's refining, filling and olive-oil-capsule production drives outsourced procurement of oil-processing auxiliaries and capsule inputs
  • Food processing and packaging equipment: from the beef noodle's dough-forming and broth-concentration lines, to the lily's freezing and baking equipment, to olive oil's cold-pressing and filling lines, Gansu's food-manufacturing equipment procurement spans many process categories
  • Packaging materials and cold-chain storage: the composite soft packaging of pre-packaged noodles, the jars for lily paste, the glass bottles and light-proof packaging for olive oil, and the cold storage and cold chain that frozen lily requires, are a procurement base that grows in proportion to finished-goods capacity

For sales teams supplying these Gansu food-manufacturing makers upstream — whether supplying flour, seasonings and dehydrated vegetables, bakery and frozen ingredients, halal-certified meat and dairy materials, oil-filling auxiliaries, or providing dough-forming, broth-concentration, freezing-and-baking, cold-pressing-and-filling equipment and cold-chain solutions — reaching the finished-goods factory customers scattered across Lanzhou, Linxia and Longnan in bulk can be done through Tianxia Gongchang, filtering Gansu food-manufacturing factory directories and decision-maker contacts along the two dimensions of region and industry, turning upstream customer development from hunting leads across the map into following a clear map.

7. Institute's Assessment: The Finished Goods Are Made, but Each Has One Last Stretch to Go

Drawing the four pieces together, Gansu's food manufacturing shows a pattern of "the finished goods are made, but each is still mid-journey." Lanzhou has broken a hand-pulled bowl into an industrially producible pre-packaged good; Lanzhou has turned fresh lily into frozen products, pastry and paste; Linxia has turned a halal culinary tradition into exportable specialty food; Longnan has pressed a Mediterranean fruit into a local edible oil. What these four share is that they have all crossed the line of "selling raw material only" and planted the finished-goods step, in real terms, in Gansu itself — and that is what most distinguishes it from provinces doing only primary processing.

But the four pieces face nearly the same geography-determined obstacle: the finished goods are made, yet the market is still far away. Pre-packaged beef noodles must contest consumer mindshare with chains born in coastal megacities; lily pastry and lily paste must leave Gansu to fetch a price; Linxia's halal goods must cross borders to meet demanding export markets; and domestic olive oil must, from scratch, educate a consumer base already inclined toward imports. For a food province deep in the inland northwest, making the finished goods is only the first step; getting these goods shipped out, sold at a price and able to sustain a brand is the real test.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's view is this: the real significance of Gansu's food manufacturing lies not in how high any one finished good's output value is stacked today, but in whether these finished-goods lines can each cross the obstacle of being "too far from the market" — whether Lanzhou's pre-packaged beef noodles can grow from early nurturing into a genuine industrial finished good of the 10-billion-yuan order rather than merely a bowl stuffed into a bag; whether the Lanzhou lily can let pastry and paste carry higher added value; whether Linxia's halal food can move steadily from local specialty to large-scale export supply; and whether Longnan's olive oil can get a bottle of inland-made domestic oil genuinely accepted by the market. For a province tested twice over by distance and by niche markets, whether it can deliver the finished goods it has already made into consumers' hands says more about this industry's future weight than its current output figures.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Gansu food-manufacturing factory directory and industry data)
  • Gansu Daily, China Daily, China News Service: Lanzhou beef noodle outlets at home and abroad totalling about 60,000 across more than 60 countries, chain-wide annual sales revenue exceeding 60 billion yuan; the Three-Year Action Plan for High-Quality Development of the Lanzhou Beef Noodle Industry (2024–2026) targeting more than 50 pre-packaged firms and more than 10 above-scale enterprises by 2026, pre-packaged revenue of 10 billion yuan and chain-wide revenue of 40 billion yuan
  • China Industry Economy Information Network, Sina Finance: Lanzhou pre-packaged beef noodles deconstructed into dough cakes, concentrated beef broth, seasoning, chilli oil and dehydrated vegetable sachets; super factories such as Zhongfu with daily output of 120 tonnes of dough cakes and capacity for 300,000 pre-packaged units; chain noodle brands largely originating outside the province and limited local pre-packaged capital interest
  • Sina Finance, The Paper, Gansu Daily: Lanzhou lily 2024 whole-chain output value of about 5.68 billion yuan, about 220 registered processing enterprises, 18 finished-goods categories including frozen lily, lily pastry and lily paste, leading firms Shenguo and Shuangkouyuan, and the Yuzhong deep-processing industrial park
  • Gansu Economic Information Network, Xinhua Silk Road, Gansu Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs list of provincial-and-above agricultural leading enterprises: more than 2,400 Linxia halal-food and ethnic-goods enterprises, industry output exceeding 3 billion yuan, more than ten export firms such as Bafang Qingheyuan with annual exports near USD 20 million, and Huifa's Linxia food supply-chain company with about 276 million yuan in 2024 sales revenue
  • Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, National Forestry and Grassland Administration, China Daily: Longnan Wudu olive plantations of several hundred thousand mu, 2024 comprehensive output value exceeding 4 billion yuan, China's largest virgin olive oil production base with virgin oil output of about 5,700 tonnes, and more than ten processing factories developing more than 80 products including edible olive oil and olive-oil capsules