A man who comes from a kiwi farming family in Meixian County, Baoji City, Shaanxi Province, and began working at a Meixian-based kiwi company known as Qifeng Fruit Industry in 2014 named Li Feng picks the fruit.

Located in north-western China, Meixian County, Baoji City, Shaanxi Province, enjoys a temperate climate, balanced rainfall, and pristine surroundings, which makes it one of the best places to grow kiwis in the country. Standing prominently among Meixian’s agricultural enterprises, Shaanxi Qifeng Fruit Industry Co. Ltd., commonly known as Qifeng Fruit Industry, has flourished since it was established in 1997. The company specialises in various facets of the kiwi industry, including production and processing, wholesale and retail operations, e-commerce, international trade and local tourism.

Qi Feng, the company’s founder, began pursuing e-commerce and engaging in international trade via a major platform in 2009. He experienced challenges in subsequent years, however, mostly due to a shortage of e-commerce talent in the area where Qifeng Fruit Industry was headquartered, resulting in sporadic business. Seeking a remedy, Qi outsourced sales and marketing operations to another company in 2013, entering into an agreement in which he was responsible for expenses and would be allowed to learn from the agency. After about a year, he realised that his vision of building a kiwi brand diverged from the agency’s, however, as it was focused solely on sales and profit.

Recognising the need for autonomy, Qi resolved to assemble his own e-commerce team, though he was not sure if he could find people who were sufficiently qualified and would want to join him in a small county in a second-to-third-tier city. In 2014, he stopping working with the agency that he had been using and made several trips to Shanghai in search of a knowledgeable ally. Qi eventually met a man who comes from a kiwi farming family in Meixian who had worked in marketing and e-commerce at some major companies and possessed a wealth of expertise in areas such as industry analysis, brand positioning, and media strategy and had also sold kiwis online on the side who would ultimately prove to be invaluable to his aspirations named Li Feng.

He was interested in working with Qi and soon became the head of Qifeng Fruit Industry’s e-commerce department. Li immediately changed the company’s slogan in order to distinguish it from its competitors and imbue the brand with richer connotations, altering it to: “Good fruit begins with quality farming.” Secondly, he enforced the use of the WeChat Chinese social media app in order to enhance internal communications in the company and digital engagement.

Qifeng Fruit Industry’s e-commerce team initially encountered resistance from other departments within the company, however. Standardised shipments and uniform packaging specifications tended to be used with traditional sales channels, whereas e-commerce channels require flexible packaging and varying shipment sizes, significantly impacting production efficiency.

The kiwi company continued to experience a shortage of e-commerce talent as well. E-commerce operations require a diverse range of personnel in areas such as backend warehousing, logistics, packaging, orders, and delivery in addition to front-end sales, operations, design, copywriting, membership marketing, brand marketing and customer service.

In 2015, Qifeng Fruit Industry established offices in Xi’an, capital city of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, as well as major cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai and began prioritising the recruitment of Shaanxi natives with e-commerce experience in order to address the situation. The company’s e-commerce performance had improved significantly after about a year, and it also began addressing the high communication costs and limited ability to execute that existed at some of its offices and facilities.

In 2015, Qifeng Fruit Industry’s e-commerce team entered into an ongoing partnership with an esteemed business-to-consumer (B2C) online retail platform operated by a large technology company. Serving as a supplier at first, the kiwi company began providing products to companies operating purely in e-commerce that had been approved by the platform and was not able to communicate with it directly. Qifeng Fruit Industry employees were very diligent with regard to the undertaking, and the company actively participated in many promotional activities organised by the platform, which enabled it to gradually gain recognition from the B2C service over the next two years, however.

In 2016, Qifeng Fruit Industry expanded its Xi’an office and transformed it into its main e-commerce operations centre. Many of the company’s staff members who had been working in other locations chose to relocate to the area and work at the desirable facility. Its Meixian employees mostly became responsible for backend tasks such as warehousing and logistics at this time, while a Guangzhou office was tasked with managing operations and warehousing related to imported fruit, and locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other cities became logistics and experience centres.

The company also established an independent packaging facility for its e-commerce division in 2016 in order to further separate its online and offline operations, ensuring that the two would be conducted according to their respective standards and not interfere with each other, and appointed the former head of its production department as its director in order to enhance supervision and manage operations more effectively.

In 2017, the B2C platform that Qifeng Fruit Industry had been working with began providing it with substantial direct support involving its core promotional resources during major shopping events. The collaboration proved fruitful and helped the company log RMB50 million of e-commerce turnover on the platform during the 2017-to-2018 sales season. The company became the top-selling kiwi company on the platform and has gradually been solidifying its position and earning a place among the major businesses working with the platform.

Qifeng Fruit Industry’s brand value is underpinned by its unwavering commitment to standardisation across all facets of the production, procurement, sorting, and packaging processes. Meixian’s kiwi farmers now harvest the fruit in a streamlined manner in close cooperation with the company, for example, whereas they used to harvest it in an uncoordinated manner while they waited for it to be purchased by suppliers, which created problems with freshness and damage mitigation. The company also works closely with village committees in order to forge enduring partnerships with farmers and promotes the adoption of recommended fertiliser and bagging techniques so as to elevate fruit quality and reinforce the brand’s identity.

The company also identifies people who are especially enthusiastic about kiwi farming in villages where people grow the fruit and provides comprehensive training covering fertilisation, cultivation, pesticide application, and other areas as well as relevant agricultural machinery to them at no cost if they are interested in becoming kiwi farming experts, which has resulted in the establishment of 180 service stations operated by those who have gotten involved and completed the programme as of mid-2021. The experts provide guidance and technical services to fellow growers, are passionate about their work, and can earn up to RMB100,000 of additional annual income through the service stations, and the services that they provide have resulted in significant changes taking place and standardisation taking root.

The journey from a simple kiwi supplier to an industry leader that Qifeng Fruit Industry has gone through underscores its commitment to controlling the entire industry chain and ensuring product quality and integrity. The comprehensive control that it exercises over production, promotion, and marketing distinguishes it from companies operating purely in farming or e-commerce and enables it to navigate market dynamics and ensure sustainable profitability across the entire industry chain, even amidst fierce competition.

Source:

AliResearch

China’s Administration and Management Institute (AMI) of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA)