Huang Ri-Xiang
the fourth generation store owner: Ms. Huang Shu-Jun
||-front row, second from left, Ms. Huang Shu-Jun
The founder of Huang Ri-Xiang was Huang Wu, who established the brand in 1924. Now it is in its fourth generation, and the fifth generation has also taken part in the operation. Our great grandfather cast crescent-moon blocks (Zhì xiáo) to decide how to divide his worldly processions among his children. My grandfather was the youngest child and he got the bean sales, so he took it over from his father in 1959. Hence, he became the second generation of Huang Ri-Xiang at Daxi. The development of Shimen Reservoir and the arrival of former President Chiang Kai-shek at Daxi in 1969 caused the rise of the tourism industry here at that time. A large number of people came to visit Daxi, so the second generation decided to expand the business of Huang Ri-Xiang. In addition to black dried bean curd, new products were added, such as dried bean curd for leisure snacks. In the beginning, we packed the dried bean curd purchased from other places. Gradually, we opened our own factory. A few years later, the second generation asked their sons to learn the technology, and the technology has been passed to the fourth generation. We later added a new product - fermented tofu. Huang Ri-Xiang already has a fan page, but we neglected to manage it in the past. Nowadays, the fifth generation is willing to come back to help manage and revise the webpage. I am committed to DIY teaching, and I have been teaching DIY for 20 years in Daxi Elementary School. Then the Daxi elementary school teachers and I came up with the idea of educating students about beans and the products made from beans.
||-Ms. Huang teaches Tofu DIY
Our product distribution is usually passive, that is, someone from the branch store will come to the main store, asking for help, and only then will the main store send somebody to do its production evaluation. The person responsible for the production evaluation is the chairman of our company, my uncle. Marketing is now a weaker link because, after all, it is an inherited business. Fortunately, there are a lot of people coming to our store to buy the merchandise, and maybe the customers will comment our products online, thus advertising for us. In fact, in the early days, it was truly based on customers’ word of mouth as our advertisement. My great grandfather once said, "Our product quality must be good. If we maintain good quality, then customers will be our best advertising staff." Therefore, we have been passive in marketing - We are not very active in promoting our products.
At present, for the domestic sales of the dried bean curd, there are stores spanning from northern to southern Taiwan, but not many. The products are also sold in Family Mart convenience stores. Because online marketing is available now, we may spend more time in the future on the Internet marketing. For export, the product sold to the United States is fermented tofu, and our products also have registered trademarks in mainland China.
||-interview in Huang Ri-Xiang
Because there are four seasons, there is a need for attention in the process of making dried bean curd - The amount of time spent soaking the beans will be different accordingly. Nowadays, there are machines that can automatically control the temperature. For example, when we want to have soybeans soaked, we input today’s temperature, and the machine will automatically release the water at its calculated time. Mixing is also very important when we make dried bean curd. If there’s too much mixing of edible gypsum, dried bean curd will be too hard, not chewy, which means it is a failure. Therefore, mixing in the process of making dried bean curd is really very important.
Among all the products, the best seller now is the braised bean curd. Our specialty is hard dried bean curd - It is harder and tastes chewier than other kind of dried bean curd. The store boss had previously shared these hard dried bean curd as snacks with his fishing buddy during their fishing trip. Since then, this hard dried bean curd has become their favorite, thus a special name ‘fishing bean curd.’ It is also deeply liked by people in Daxi. The ‘fishing bean curd’ is not found in other places, nor is displayed to sell in the store of Huang Ri-Xiang. It is a special commodity that only locals know and only available when they specifically ask the store boss for it. Our products have a home delivery service that can be ordered by phone or by fax. Products exported to the United States are those that have long shelf-life, such as fermented tofu.
||-We ate hard dried bean curd.
During the food safety issue, the xanthine toxin and melamine were not detected in our products, but we experienced a biggest negative impact because everyone was alarmed with the bean products at that time. Later, we announced that Huang Ri-Xiang products did not contain melamine, and they had been certified by the government. We informed the customers that if they had doubts before buying the dried bean curd, they could check the website of Health Bureau. The Health Bureau website listed which manufacturer’s dried bean curd was in question in that particular month. As long as you went to the Health Bureau website and typed in the dried bean curd food safety issue, you would be able to find the stores that were having the safety issue. We are a company with the reputation of producing our own products, not outsourcing them to other manufacturers, so our product quality is guaranteed. One company caught with melamine in its products last time is a company that was established for less than a decade. Its products were problematic. Anyway, the scope of the impact was very large. We posted the notice in each of our distributors. We also downloaded the certificate from the Health Bureau website because data from Health Bureau is most trustworthy. Then we put the certificate on all our distribution stores and our own network to prove that the products from our family business were completely absent from this food safety issue. However, we were uncertain how many customers we saved by doing so though.
Since then, government has organized and provided a number of food safety lectures. These are actually great for some business in Daxi. Government helps counsel the underground factories to operate openly. In the past, many of the dried bean curd in Daxi were produced in the underground factories. Now the Soybean Association coordinates with the government to make them become ‘formal’ factories to meet the food standards of Health Bureau.
For foreigners, Daxi Dried Bean Curd is not very well known. For example, when foreign students at the Normal University Language Center wanted to know Taiwanese local cuisine, dried bean curd were introduced to them through the office of the Museum of Wood Art so that we could provide the opportunity for them to experience the tofu DIY.
(The following three photos were provided by Huang Ri-Xiang.)
||-students from language center of NTNU
||-Tofu DIY
||-students having fun in tofu DIY