1. To Understand Henan's Food Processing, Recognise the Land Beneath It

Agricultural and sideline food processing is, at heart, an industry that hugs the land. Where grain grows, flour is milled; where hogs are raised, slaughtering and cutting follow; where oilseed is sown, oil is pressed. The raw material is local, and so is the processing. That logic fails on the coast, but applied to Henan it reads almost as a perfect footnote.

Henan sits in the heart of the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, one of the country's few contiguous high-yield farming regions. In 2023 its grain output reached about 132.5 billion jin, holding above 130 billion jin for seven straight years and ranking second nationally; it is also the only province growing strong-, medium- and weak-gluten wheat at once, with seven of China's ten leading wheat varieties originating here. This land yields not only abundant grain but wheat suited to every processing use. So Henan's food processing, from the very start, has revolved not around the ocean but, plainly, around the land. Its core question is how to take the wheat harvested, the hogs raised and the peanuts dug from this plain each year and turn them, stably, at scale and with added value, into factory capacity.

It is precisely this gift of raw material lying underfoot and needing local processing that has pushed Henan into the country's first tier of food processing. It long ago stopped being content as the nation's granary and, following the path of processing, grew into the nation's kitchen: about three in ten bags of flour, half the ham sausage, a third of the instant noodles, a quarter of the steamed buns, three-fifths of the glutinous rice balls and roughly seven-tenths of the frozen dumplings in China come from this province. Henan now has over 6,000 large-scale agricultural-product processors and a modern food cluster topping a trillion yuan, with processing a pillar of the whole province. The Industry Research Institute treats it as a regional sample for exactly this reason: it is the most complete and typical case of a land-based processing belt. This report endorses no company's market performance; it only sets out the real structure of this belt.

2. Wheat to Flour to Noodles: The First Main Beam Holding Up the Industry

To weigh Henan's food processing, first see how thick this main beam of wheat processing is.

Henan is both a great wheat grower and a great miller. About three in ten bags of flour in China come from here, a share built not by a few large mills but by a whole set of planting, storage, milling and noodle-making capabilities gathered along the wheat belt over decades. At the top of that capability is Wudeli Group, sitting first nationally in capacity: among the country's top three wheat processors, Wudeli mills about 77,000 tonnes a day, far above Yihai Kerry and COFCO behind it. The flour plant Wudeli commissioned at Suiping, Zhumadian, in 2021 built what is called the world's largest single flour-milling workshop, able to process about 6,000 tonnes of wheat a day, lifting the group's daily wheat-milling capacity to about 64,000 tonnes and keeping it ahead in global flour milling; its plant in Xinxiang also reaches about 9,000 tonnes a day.

The flour milled does not stop in the grain bag but follows the chain downward into dried noodles, instant noodles, steamed buns and frozen pasta. Xiangnian Food in Nanyang has, at its intelligent plant, reached daily processing of about 3,000 tonnes of wheat and about 2,000 tonnes of dried noodles, with a grain quality and safety traceability system in place; Suiping and other areas drew in Keming Noodle, which signed with more than a hundred cooperatives to concentrate over 100,000 mu of premium strong-gluten dedicated wheat, connecting the wheat field directly to the mill's raw-material end. From one grain, to one bag of flour, to a handful of noodles and a basket of buns, Henan has made wheat processing into a complete chain of layered value-adding, which is exactly the basis for its holding the national lead in flour, instant noodles, frozen pasta and several other segments at once.

3. Hogs to Slaughter to Meat Products: This Beam Seen Through Shuanghui and Muyuan

Henan's second main beam in food processing is hog slaughter and meat-product processing. Its prominence is concentrated in two leaders sitting at different points of the chain.

One is Shuanghui in Luohe. Over forty years, this enterprise, which began as a local meat-packing plant, grew into a leading-scale pork-processing giant, selling ham sausage, chilled meat and meat products nationwide and lifting Luohe into a core city for meat-product processing. The other is Muyuan, which began in Neixiang, Nanyang. Originally a leader on the farming end, it had hog output of about 63.816 million head in 2023; it only entered slaughter in 2019 but within a few years built designed slaughter capacity of about 29 million head a year, surpassing Shuanghui in slaughter volume to top the nation in 2023, and built projects in Neixiang such as multi-storey meat-industry complexes that twist farming and slaughter processing into one place.

One deep in meat-product processing, the other extending from farming into slaughter, Shuanghui and Muyuan together cover the two ends of the hog chain, from slaughter and cutting to meat products. That Henan can make "half the country's ham sausage comes from here" a reality rests precisely on this depth, with farming, slaughter and meat products linked end to end within the province, so hogs need no long-distance transport and enter slaughter lines and processing plants nearby, every value-adding step kept in the province.

4. Peanut to Peanut Oil: An Oilseed Chain Grown From Zhengyang

The third face of Henan's food processing is oilseed, peanut above all.

Henan is the country's largest peanut-producing province, with planting area of about 19.3 million mu and output of about 6.15 million tonnes in 2022, roughly a quarter of the national area and a third of national output. The fist of that output is Zhengyang County in Zhumadian. Zhengyang holds peanut planting steadily at about 1.7 million mu with output over 500,000 tonnes, designated for many consecutive years as the nation's top peanut-producing county and known as China's Capital of Peanuts.

With this raw-material base, Zhengyang did not settle for selling raw peanuts but pushed the chain deeper. It drew in Luhua, building a project producing about 150,000 tonnes of peanut oil a year and able to process about 350,000 tonnes of peanuts locally, equivalent to absorbing over 60 percent of the county's annual output; the county also gathers dozens of peanut deep-processors making peanut oil, snack peanuts, fresh peanuts, peanut beverages and dozens of varieties, sold to over twenty provinces. From one peanut, to a barrel of peanut oil and a bag of snack peanuts, Zhengyang made oilseed processing into a chain of "press it locally, use up every part locally", forming a distinctive oilseed-led pole within Henan's food processing.

5. Luohe: Gathering a City Into China's First City of Food

Drawing the wheat, hog and peanut chains together, Henan's food processing has also borne a higher-order sample, Luohe.

Luohe is the first "City of Food" designated by the China National Food Industry Association, later also earning titles such as "City of Food Equipment". Its weight is written in scale: the food industry of the Luohe Economic and Technological Development Zone has revenue topping RMB150 billion, and the city's whole food industry tops RMB250 billion, about a quarter of the province. Here gather over a thousand food enterprises led by Shuanghui, including local leaders and landed multinational and domestic food names, forming a complete ecosystem from meat products and flour-based goods to snack foods.

Luohe's significance is in showing that a land-based processing belt can evolve from "growing a single point" to "forming circles and chains". A not-large city in the Central Plains, by gathering meat, flour, seasoning, packaging and equipment into one place, grew into a food cluster worth over two hundred billion. This clustering is not merely a stacking of enterprise numbers but the result of raw material, ingredients, packaging, equipment and cold chain interlocking within one city, lifting Henan's food processing from "each place doing its own" into a benchmark industrial height.

6. Leaders and Upstream: The Procurement System of This Belt

Gathering the clusters, the leadership structure of Henan's food processing comes clear: it is held not by one giant alone but, along the three main chains of wheat, hogs and peanuts, by leaders each standing on its own, then drawn together by clusters such as Luohe. This structure means its upstream procurement demand splits into several systems, each with its own focus yet overlapping:

  • Agricultural raw material and storage: wheat, hogs and peanuts each correspond to vast, steady raw-material procurement, ever stricter on quality, gluten, slaughter specification and traceability, behind which sit storage, drying and procurement facilities;
  • Food ingredients and seasonings: from dedicated and improver flours for flour-based goods, to curing, seasoning and water-retention agents for meat products, to seasoning and snack formulas for peanut goods, a steady buyer of various food additives, seasonings and functional ingredients;
  • Packaging materials: woven and composite bags for flour and dried noodles, casings and soft packaging for ham sausage and chilled meat, drum and bottle containers for peanut oil, mixed in type and huge in volume, an easily underrated niche;
  • Food processing and slaughter equipment: from flour-milling lines and noodle forming and drying lines, to hog slaughter and cutting lines and ham-sausage filling and sterilising lines, to peanut pressing and refining lines, spanning many processes with rich equipment-procurement tiers;
  • Cold chain and storage facilities: chilled meat, frozen pasta and meat products carry continuous demand for cold storage, cold-chain transport and warehousing that grows in proportion to capacity.

For sales teams supplying these Henan wheat, hog, peanut and integrated food processors upstream, Tianxia Gongchang lets them filter the factory directory and decision-maker contacts precisely along the two dimensions of region and industry for Henan agricultural and sideline food processing, turning door-by-door inquiry across Luohe, Nanyang, Xinxiang and Zhumadian, and across flour, slaughter and peanut oil, into customer development by map.

7. The Institute's Assessment: The Raw Material Is in the Soil, the Weight Is on the Processing Chain

Putting the blocks together, Henan's food processing shows a shape wholly opposite to that of coastal provinces: the raw material comes not from the sea but from the land, the main beams are not aquatic processing but the three land-hugging chains of wheat, hogs and peanuts, and each is thick enough to hold a national lead. Wudeli milled wheat into flour first nationally in capacity, Shuanghui and Muyuan made hogs into a meat chain holding half the country's ham sausage, Zhengyang made peanuts into an oilseed pole as China's Capital of Peanuts, and Luohe gathered these links into a City of Food worth over two hundred billion, each chain with its own raw material, technique and leader.

Its worries are written in the same word, the land. Grain and oilseed raw materials are heavily affected by planting cycles, weather and market prices, and industry profit is squeezed repeatedly between the raw-material and finished ends; national agricultural and sideline food processing profit fell about a tenth year on year in 2023, a reminder that this "large in scale, low in unit price" industry is no easy ride; and the higher processing concentration climbs, the stricter the demands on stable raw-material quality and controllable cost.

The Industry Research Institute's view is this: the true weight of Henan's food processing has never lain in how much wheat it grows, how many hogs it raises or how many peanuts it digs, but in whether it can keep converting "the abundance underfoot" into "the value added in processing", whether flour can grow more dedicated, functional and high-value foods beyond the volume-driven basic grain bag; whether hogs can move from selling carcass meat toward deeper meat products and branded goods; whether peanuts can extend beyond pressing oil into snack and functional fine processing. Having the raw material in the soil is Henan's gift, but the grade of this industry settles, in the end, on how far it processes each grain of wheat, each hog and each peanut grown from this plain. How a province treats the raw material the land underfoot hands it often tells more about where this industry has reached than how much it harvested.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Henan agricultural and sideline food processing factory directory and industrial data)
  • Henan Provincial Bureau of Statistics, "How Grain Becomes Quality Goods", and related public reports (Henan has over 6,000 large-scale agricultural-product processors and a modern food cluster topping a trillion yuan; about three in ten bags of flour, half the ham sausage, a third of the instant noodles, a quarter of the steamed buns, three-fifths of the glutinous rice balls and roughly seven-tenths of the frozen dumplings in China come from Henan; Henan is the only province growing strong-, medium- and weak-gluten wheat at once, with seven of China's ten leading wheat varieties originating here)
  • National Bureau of Statistics, Announcement on 2023 Grain Output (2023 Henan grain output about 132.49 billion jin, above 130 billion jin for seven straight years, second nationally)
  • Qianzhan Industry Research Institute and securities public materials (2024 Wudeli wheat-processing capacity about 77,200 tonnes per day, first nationally; Yihai Kerry about 44,000 tonnes per day; COFCO about 23,000 tonnes per day; 2021 Suiping flour plant built the world's largest single flour-milling workshop processing about 6,000 tonnes of wheat a day; group daily wheat-milling capacity about 64,000 tonnes)
  • CNR and Dahe.cn (Wudeli Xinxiang Flour commissioned in 2002, daily capacity about 9,000 tonnes; Xiangnian Food intelligent plant processing about 3,000 tonnes of wheat and about 2,000 tonnes of dried noodles a day; Keming Noodle landed in Suiping, signing with over a hundred cooperatives to concentrate over 100,000 mu of premium strong-gluten dedicated wheat)
  • Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development Co. 2023 Annual Report and public materials (Shuanghui as a leading-scale pork-processing enterprise headquartered in Luohe)
  • Muyuan public materials and securities research reports (Muyuan began in Neixiang, Henan; 2023 hog output about 63.816 million head; entered slaughter in 2019 building designed slaughter capacity about 29 million head a year; surpassed Shuanghui in 2023 slaughter volume to top the nation)
  • Henan Provincial Development and Reform Commission and Henan Daily (Luohe as China's first City of Food; Luohe development-zone food industry revenue over RMB150 billion; city food industry over RMB250 billion, about a quarter of the province; over a thousand food enterprises led by Shuanghui)
  • Xuchang News, Dahe.cn and Zhumadian public reports (Henan as the country's largest peanut-producing province; 2022 planting area about 19.3 million mu and output about 6.15 million tonnes, about a quarter and a third of national totals; Zhengyang as China's Capital of Peanuts, holding about 1.7 million mu with output over 500,000 tonnes; Luhua's Zhengyang project producing about 150,000 tonnes of peanut oil a year, processing about 350,000 tonnes of peanuts, over 60 percent of county output; dozens of peanut deep-processors selling to over twenty provinces)
  • National Bureau of Statistics, 2023 National Large-Scale Industrial Enterprise Profits (2023 national agricultural and sideline food processing profit down about 11.0 percent year on year)