'Hometown of giant pandas' becomes major caviar producer in China

What used to take centuries now takes a generation as we now have literally millions of entrpreneurs with access to coin.

The product is unique and the market global.  The first twenty years of Chinas emergence was utterly imitative.  The last twenty years has been innovative and we all can be proud.

This will certainly be replicated elsewhere and surely in Russia.

'Hometown of giant pandas' becomes major caviar producer in China

Chinese-made caviar accounts for some 60% of global production

Silver Pot, in Chengdu, China, serves a crab and caviar salad with snap peas added to give texture and color accents. (Photo by Zheng Chen)

SHUNSUKE TABETA, Nikkei staff writer

January 18, 2025 08:10 JST

BEIJING -- Huang Linya, an employee at a local company in Chengdu, Sichuan, sat down to eat an original dish at Silver Pot -- a Michelin-starred restaurant in the capital city of the inland Chinese province. She ordered julienned cantaloupes wrapped in wheat dough, with broiled pork slices placed on top of the dough and caviar and Chinese mahogany leaf buds decoratively added.

"The combination of the popping texture of caviar and the crispy, spicy texture of pork makes this dish very tasty," she said. The dish was created by Zhao Xiaosong, the chief chef at Silver Pot, who says his goal is to produce "new culinary experiences combining Chinese and overseas ingredients."

At the end of Huang's meal, Zhao baked her an original version of a Chengdu favorite: crepes stuffed with Sichuan pickles called danhonggao.

What was his twist on the dish? Also caviar.

Caviar, which is made from sturgeon eggs that have been cured with salt, is big business in Sichuan. The luxury food item is one of the rarest in the world, along with foie gras and truffles. While caviar from sturgeons caught in the Caspian Sea is highly sought-after, the fish is now in danger of extinction as a result of overfishing.

\A dish of crisply grilled pork slices on thin dough made of wheat flour, with caviar and leaf buds decoratively added. (Photo by Zheng Chen)

Since international trading of sturgeons, including their eggs, is restricted under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (better known as the Washington Convention), caviar made from sturgeon that are farm-raised in China is in growing demand due to its stable quality at an affordable price. Such caviar now accounts for some 60% of global production.

Yaan, another city in Sichuan province, is drawing attention as a major producer of Chinese caviar. The mountainous city at the eastern tip of the Tibetan Plateau is known as the "hometown of giant pandas" after the animal became globally famous when a French priest discovered its white and black fur there in 1869.

Zhao Xiaosong, left, chief chef at Silver Pot, bakes a crepe, using caviar, in front of Huang Linya. (Photo by Zheng Chen)

The region is rich in nature and is also home to the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries, which, according to a local news report, supports some 340 giant pandas in the wild. The sanctuaries are listed as a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site.

At the end of a winding mountain track through bamboo forests that feed these pandas, sits Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries and their huge aquafarming facilities.

The facilities, which cover a land area of more than 150,000 square meters, have 274 pools for breeding sturgeons. Because it takes eight to 15 years to collect eggs big enough for shipment as caviar, more than 700,000 sturgeons are farmed at a time, separated by species and growing conditions.

Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries raises more than 700,000 sturgeons in a large number of pools on a huge land lot. (Photo by Zheng Chen)

When sturgeons grow to weigh tens of kilograms to more than 100 kg each, they are caught from the pools after ultrasound confirms that the eggs in them are ready for harvesting. The collected eggs are cleansed, cured with salt, and sealed in cans for storage. The caviar is then shipped between September and December.

Inside the processing plant, where the temperature is always around 12 degrees Celsius, some 70 workers in white coats work silently. "We add nothing but salt from Europe. To maintain high quality, we complete the entire process within 15 minutes," said Jiang Lan, who is in charge of Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries' original brand, Frosista.

In Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries' processing plant, where the temperature is kept at around 12 degrees C, the entire process, from collecting eggs to sealing them in a can, is completed within 15 minutes. (Photo by Zheng Chen)

Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries produces some 60 tonnes of caviar a year and exports two-thirds of them to more than 30 countries. It has come to capture a global market share of more than 10%, the hard way.

Founder Li Jun studied aquaculture at the Dalian Fisheries University, which is now Dalian Ocean University, and did further study at a fisheries research institute in his hometown province of Sichuan. In 1996, he started a business raising catfish and other fish.

A panda figure holding a sturgeon model welcomes visitors to Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries' caviar production complex. (Photo by Zheng Chen)

As competition was intense in the catfish cultivation sector, Li decided to raise sturgeons around 2001, expecting huge returns if successful as farming them was considered extremely difficult. In the absence of successful cases in China, he visited various cultivation farms overseas and repeated a process of trial and error using juvenile fish imported from suppliers from Russia and other countries.

In 2006, Li founded Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries to enter the caviar business, but because collecting eggs from the sturgeon takes a lot of time, initial fundraising was a significant challenge.

To support the business as it grew, Li had to sell male sturgeons and other fish along the way. After overcoming various difficulties, such as the death of 300,000 juveniles due to the failed management of temperatures during the summer and the big Sichuan earthquake of 2008, his company eventually became capable of producing caviar of stable quality in 2012. Thanks to the use of meltwater from the Tibetan Plateau, the business manages to produce caviar with a robust flavor and with no unwanted taste.

To find customers, Li and his staff visited Europe, the heart of global caviar consumption.

A Luxembourg-based company praised the quality of the product in a blind test that concealed the area of production and became Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries' first customer. Following this success in Europe, caviar from the hometown of giant pandas is now finding markets around the world.

Chinese-made caviar is used in appetizers and other meals at The Hall, a restaurant operated by the luxury French brand Louis Vuitton in Chengdu. The Shanghai outlet of the French restaurant chain Jean-Georges, which is highly popular in major cities around the world, uses caviar from Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries in its signature dish, "Scrambled Eggs Caviar."

Tsutomu Ochiai, owner and chef of La Bettola da Ochiai, a popular Italian restaurant in Tokyo, said he also prefers the company's caviar because of its "stable quality and its popping texture in the mouth."

Sichuan has many historical sites mentioned in the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," such as the scenic Jiuzhaigou valley, which is also listed by UNESCO as a Natural World Heritage Site. Visitors to the province are encouraged to enjoy local specialties, such as their caviar and dishes using the local huajiao pepper, at restaurants across the region -- including one regarded as the birthplace of mapo tofu.