Chapter 82 - 81: Another Application
Chapter 82: Chapter 81: Another Application
Zhang Xinyi, carrying two boxes, walked over to a table where several of her colleagues from the e-commerce department were sitting.
"Manager."
"Sister Yi."
"No need to be so formal. Let’s eat." Zhang Xinyi smiled and shook her head as she opened her lunch box. She set the evaluation form aside and then opened the food container.
’So they’re fish balls? Could they be eel fish balls?’
There were three types of fish balls in the container: fish tofu cubes, curry fish balls, and seaweed fish balls. She picked up one of the curry fish balls—one without any sauce—took a bite, and chewed it for a moment.
’There’s no obvious muddy taste, just a faint hint of fishiness. It seems a bit firmer than a typical curry fish ball—the texture is more like a pork meatball. What kind of fish is this made from? Is this what eel fish balls are like?’
Next, she picked up a cube of fish tofu, this time soaked in curry sauce and tomato sauce. After taking a bite, Zhang Xinyi felt the fish tofu was softer and more tender than the previous fish ball, and again, she found no major issues.
Last was the seaweed fish ball.
After trying all three test products, she took a ballpoint pen from her pocket, ticked off boxes on the evaluation form, and wrote down some suggestions.
"Sister Yi, can I borrow your pen for a second?" A female colleague nearby, who was also eating the fish balls, was getting ready to fill out her evaluation form.
Ah Bin, sitting opposite her, asked curiously, "What kind of fish are these made from? They aren’t made from eel, are they?"
Another colleague picked up a white-cut chicken drumstick and shook his head. "Probably not. The company’s eels are all used for retort pouches and tinplate cans. There’s no need to use such an expensive fish to make fish balls. Fish balls are usually made with cheap, plentiful fish."
"Who cares? They taste pretty good, anyway," a female colleague said while eating a curry fish ball. "I just wonder what the retail price will be."
Ah Bin took a sip of his kelp and pork rib soup. "Why do you care about the retail price? The company gives them out during holidays anyway. You’ll eat them until you’re sick of them."
The other employees came to the same realization.
The thought of the canned eel they had received from the company last New Year, still sitting at home, brought helpless smiles to their faces.
Their boss did indeed love giving employees the company’s own products.
In fact, Jiang Miao had a hidden motive for doing this: it encouraged employees to be diligent about hygiene during the production process, knowing that these products would be distributed to all staff.
Furthermore, to prevent employees from trying to be clever and treating products differently based on production dates, the canned fish the company distributed was always randomly selected from products made in the past two months.
This practice of having employees test the fish balls during lunch or dinner in the company cafeteria was nothing new; the company had made similar arrangements many times before.
For example, a while ago, items like beggar’s chicken, char siu, white-cut chicken, and roast goose were tested continuously in the company cafeteria for over a month.
And the company cafeteria now employed not just a few people, but over twenty.
This matter was arranged by Jiang Haibo. He was a man who did things meticulously, with every step interlinked. He liked to make full use of the resources at his disposal, and the reform of the company headquarters’ cafeteria was a project he had personally spearheaded.
After all, as the number of company employees grew, the cafeteria was bound to face an issue: the number of kitchen staff would need to increase, but this created the risk of wasted labor due to inefficient resource allocation.
Consider this: the company’s five head chefs all started at the D3 salary grade. Adding in ten kitchen helpers, five kitchen cleaners, a cafeteria supervisor, and Jiang Miao’s mother, there were twenty-two people in total.
For that many people to be preparing only three meals a day for just over two hundred employees was clearly a waste of resources.
After all, the headquarters’ cafeteria was equipped with a great deal of equipment. Tasks like chopping and washing vegetables were actually done using machines or with machine assistance to reduce the intensity of the labor.
After investigating the cafeteria’s operating model, Jiang Haibo found that it used a two-shift system. The chefs’ morning shift ran from 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM and from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM, for a total of four hours. The evening shift was from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM, plus a late-night snack service from 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM, also totaling four hours.
This system resulted in a lot of fragmented downtime.
Therefore, Jiang Haibo pushed for cafeteria reform to make full use of this fragmented time.
Currently, the eel restaurant’s roast goose, white-cut chicken, char siu, kabayaki eel, braised pork trotters, and curry fried rice were all prepared centrally at the company cafeteria and then delivered to the eel restaurant in small refrigerated trucks and three-wheeled vehicles.
This turned the headquarters’ cafeteria into a central kitchen, allowing the eel restaurant to reduce the size of its own kitchen.
As for whether the chefs were willing to work an extra two hours?
The answer was a resounding yes.
On one hand, the company’s cafeteria chefs were mostly independent hires, unlike the kitchens in some restaurants, which are often staffed by entire, established crews. These kitchen crews tend to be very cliquey, and some of the more dominant ones even demand a profit-sharing arrangement with the restaurant.
On the other hand, Jiang Haibo was a firm believer in the principle that you have to feed the horse if you want it to run.
Although those two hours fell within their work schedule, he knew that offering incentives was crucial to ensure the chefs would give their all without complaint.
Therefore, the cafeteria received a 5% commission on the dishes sold at the eel restaurant. This commission was collected at the end of the month and distributed to everyone in the kitchen based on their contribution.
This reform transformed the headquarters cafeteria from an employee welfare department into a production department.
In the future, they could open branches of the eel restaurant in high-traffic areas like Shanmei District and Hai Feng County, with all food prepared and delivered by the central kitchen at headquarters.
Moreover, Hailufeng Company’s cafeteria had another feature that set it apart from typical restaurants: an extreme focus on data recording and recipe management.
The company had all its chefs sign a contract upon hiring, requiring them to create detailed procedural files for every dish made in the cafeteria’s kitchen. The practice of chefs "holding back" secret techniques was not allowed.
This was a clause written in black and white in their employment contracts. If a chef couldn’t accept this condition, they wouldn’t be hired as a chef at Hailufeng Company.
The company also did its best to use machines to replace tedious, repetitive tasks.
For example, when it came to chopping and washing vegetables, machines were obviously more efficient. An ultrasonic washing sink could blow manual washing out of the water.
The only place human labor was truly needed was in identifying things like rotten leaves and insects.
Jiang Haibo planned to transform the company’s kitchen into a research-and-development-oriented central kitchen. In terms of process, he wasn’t chasing so-called "high-end, impressive" techniques. Instead, he pursued mechanization, automation, and simplification to ensure product quality remained consistent, a standard requirement for many central kitchens.
The R&D for the cannery’s new fish balls involved the company’s cafeteria chefs from start to finish.
However, the raw material for these fish balls was not eel, as Zhang Xinyi and the others had guessed. It was Egyptian Catfish.
That’s right. These fish balls and fish tofu were all made with Egyptian Catfish as the core raw material.
The reason for choosing Egyptian Catfish as a raw material was simple: it was cheap and plentiful.
Egyptian Catfish at four yuan per kilogram, compared to Spanish mackerel which started at over ten yuan per kilogram on average—the cost difference between the two was astronomical.
So why didn’t other fish ball processing plants use Egyptian Catfish as a raw material?
The reason was that mass-farmed, pond-raised Egyptian Catfish have an extremely strong, muddy taste that is difficult to mask completely, even with heavy seasoning.
Customers could easily taste the muddiness in fish balls made from ordinary Egyptian Catfish, so they wouldn’t buy them. And if customers weren’t buying, the processing plants certainly weren’t going to use Egyptian Catfish as a raw material.
The company’s cannery chose Egyptian Catfish as a raw material because Jiang Miao had the technology to solve this problem.
By feeding them a specific diet and keeping them in special plastic tanks with a continuous flow of water, it was possible to remove 99% of the geosmin—the source of the muddy taste—from the bodies of pond-raised Egyptian Catfish in about twenty-four days.
Anyone who has eaten wild Egyptian Catfish from a reservoir knows that its flavor isn’t bad at all. Its texture is on par with eel, making it a perfectly viable substitute. In fact, some small-time Japanese restaurants already use Egyptian Catfish as a replacement for eel.
Therefore, the company planned to develop Egyptian Catfish as a raw material for feed, while simultaneously using its technology to remove the vast majority of the geosmin and use the fish as a raw material for fish balls.
The fact that the cafeteria staff couldn’t detect any muddy taste meant the new fish ball product was already more than halfway to being a success.
Li Xinhua had calculated the comprehensive cost of the new fish balls. With large-scale production, the average cost per kilogram would be just 3.76 yuan.
Meanwhile, Guotai Food Factory, another local aquatic processing enterprise in Shanmei District, sold its golden fish balls and fish tofu for a wholesale price of 53 yuan per kilogram.
Li Xinhua had investigated his competitor’s production costs. Although he lacked highly detailed data, he was certain Guotai Food Factory’s costs couldn’t be too low because they used sea fish as a raw material. Even with bulk purchases at the port, the price of sea fish wouldn’t drop below 10 yuan per kilogram.
Even if Hailufeng Company didn’t engage in a price war and sold its products at a similar price, the gross profit per kilogram would still reach 49.24 yuan.
Such were the benefits of mastering technology.
Moreover, Li Xinhua had discovered another advantage Hailufeng Company possessed.
Guotai Food Factory’s raw material supply was extremely unstable. After all, there was an annual fishing ban. As a large factory that required bulk purchasing, the small fishing boats that secretly went to sea during the moratorium could never meet Guotai Food Factory’s demand for raw materials.
The reason Li Xinhua knew this was because every year, at the start of the fishing season, Guotai Food Factory would recruit large numbers of rural women from the villages in the district to be temporary workers. Anyone in the area could tell you about it.
This pointed to only one conclusion: the factory’s raw material supply was extremely unstable.
By using Egyptian Catfish as its raw material, Hailufeng Company could effectively circumvent the problem of an unstable supply.
This led to another question: why did so many food processing plants have such poor profitability or such weak resilience to risk?
It was because many of them couldn’t control a stable supply channel for their raw materials. As soon as there was a supply issue or a sudden price hike, the factory’s profits could plummet.
Li Xinhua deeply agreed with Jiang Miao’s thinking: raw materials are the lifeblood of a food processing enterprise. By mastering the production of raw materials and using that as a starting point, the entire industrial chain they developed would become incredibly robust.
For example, why could some of the nation’s large feed manufacturers expand into hog farming and meat processing with such ease? It was because they themselves were already at the upper end of the industrial chain. Extending downstream was as natural as flowing with the current.
Of course, the industrial chains of even these large feed manufacturers didn’t start far enough upstream.
The true upstream was grain production, deep-sea fishing, and edible oil processing. Only after that came feed processing.
And Jiang Miao’s Hailufeng Company was now quietly extending its reach up that very industrial chain.