Guangdong Reception Hall | Exclusive Interview with Yi Hao Foods President Li Xiaobing: Building Brand Through Quality, Revitalizing Rural Areas Through Industry

CNR Guangzhou News, March 13 — (Reporter Zheng Shaochun, Guan Wenqing, Intern Reporter Lei Jiayi) Springtime in Lingnan, filled with the aroma of Cantonese flavors. The “Guang Goods Go Global · Yue Mu Youpin” Cultural Market Promotion Event will kick off on March 14. Li Xiaobing, President of Guangdong Yihou Food Co., Ltd. and Co-founder of the Yihou Native Pig Brand, will showcase specialty products such as Yihou Black Pig Lard, Soup Dumplings, and Grilled Sausages. Having dedicated twenty years to the native pig industry, Li Xiaobing has always upheld quality as his core principle, driving brand and industrial development simultaneously, enabling Yihou Native Pig to expand from Lingnan to the entire country. On March 12, Li Xiaobing was interviewed by CNR’s “Guangdong Reception Room,” where he shared insights on how to make Cantonese products go viral, the path of industry chain development, and thoughts on industry support for farmers.

Yihou Native Pig Preserved Sausage (Photo provided by interviewee, CNR release)

Quality as the Core, Promoting Cantonese Premium Products to Go Viral

Centered on “Promoting Consumption, Building Brands, Expanding Markets,” the “Guang Goods Go Global · Yue Mu Youpin” Cultural Market Promotion Event is a key initiative to deepen the spring campaign of “Guang Goods Go Global.” It aims to facilitate the connection between production and sales, brand dissemination, and export channels. Li Xiaobing believes that current consumer demand has shifted from “eating enough” to “eating well.” This market event precisely aligns with this trend by creating immersive consumption scenarios and building direct channels for Yue Mu Youpin to reach nationwide markets, which is a significant benefit for enterprises, farmers, and product brands.

In Li Xiaobing’s view, the “Guang Goods Go Global” initiative can help more consumers recognize “Yue” branded quality products. During this event, many renowned, high-quality livestock products from across the province will be showcased, with Yihou Food’s pork lard, soup dumplings, and grilled sausages as main highlights, alongside other Yue Mu Youpin products. Li Xiaobing firmly believes that quality is the core competitive advantage for products to go viral.

Yihou Native Pig Soup Dumplings (Photo provided by interviewee, CNR release)

Yihou Native Pig Black Pig Lard exemplifies quality-driven success. Li Xiaobing states that thanks to strict quality control, Yihou Native Pig Black Pig Lard quickly gained popularity upon launch, with high repurchase rates. “Today, consumers prefer to eat less but better; price is no longer the main concern—quality and taste are key. This is one of the reasons why Yihou Food can establish a firm presence in the national market.”

Full Industry Chain Control, Building a Foundation of Quality with Standards

With twenty years of experience in the native pig industry, Yihou Food has become an industry leader by implementing a full industry chain layout covering breeding, farming, processing, and sales, using standardized operations to strengthen quality assurance. Li Xiaobing admits that breeding and preserving native pig varieties require higher standards across all links. Since its inception, the company has prioritized quality and branding as its foundation, maintaining this focus for two decades.

Breeding and preservation are the roots of the native pig industry and are crucial to the company’s core competitiveness. Li Xiaobing explains that Yihou Food began early to develop breeding and preservation efforts. In May 2023, after more than ten years of cultivation, the new “Village Black Pig” breed was approved by the National Livestock and Poultry Genetic Resources Committee, retaining the meat qualities of native pigs while addressing the shortcomings of traditional local breeds.

Yihou Food also established the country’s first multi-breed live gene bank in Conghua, Guangzhou, conserving four major local pig breeds from Guangdong, protecting and developing local breeds through industrialization. “In the future, the core competitiveness of the enterprise will be the breed,” Li Xiaobing emphasizes. “Genetic resources are the ‘chip’ of agriculture,” and the high-quality taste of Yihou Black Pig Lard stems from the innate advantages of superior local pig breeds.

On the farming side, Yihou Food adopts a “company + base + farmers” model. The bases are independently built by the company, with farmers engaging in breeding at these bases. This reduces the capital threshold for farmers and facilitates unified management. “Building a pig farm costs at least hundreds of thousands or even millions of yuan, which is hard for individual farmers to afford. We build the bases, farmers breed there, solving their funding issues and allowing us to better control quality,” Li Xiaobing explains.

On the processing side, Yihou Food follows market trends by developing deep-processed products, launching convenient foods such as soup dumplings, grilled sausages, and water dumplings, catering to young consumers’ dietary preferences. Li Xiaobing admits that today’s young consumers have a strong demand for convenient, high-quality foods. Yihou Food’s deep-processed products, made primarily from premium native pig meat, ensure quality while providing consumers with easy meal options. “For example, Yihou Native Pig Black Pig Lard is produced with standardized processes, solving issues like difficulty controlling heat during home cooking, inconsistent taste, and harmful substances, making traditional ingredients more suitable for modern consumption scenarios.”

In sales, Li Xiaobing tells us that besides traditional channels like farmers’ markets and large supermarkets, Yihou Food has also expanded online sales through e-commerce live broadcasts, aligning with young consumers’ habits and injecting vitality into the brand. The rapid popularity of Yihou Native Pig Black Pig Lard online is partly due to this channel strategy.

Yihou Food actively promotes deep integration of industry, academia, and research, establishing partnerships with South China Agricultural University, Sun Yat-sen University’s School of Life Sciences, and other institutions to develop technologies in breeding, nutrition, and disease control. Li Xiaobing believes that universities possess advanced technology and research resources but lack practical application platforms. Enterprises, as market entities, serve as bridges for translating research into production and breeding, enhancing technological levels, and realizing technological upgrades in the native pig industry and improving meat product quality.

She sees industry chain development as a comprehensive, coordinated effort across all links—breeding, farming, processing, and sales—only by maintaining standards and quality throughout can brands grow more steadily and sustainably, and the native pig industry achieve high-quality development.

Yihou Native Pig Pork (Photo provided by interviewee, CNR release)

Linking Farmers and Supporting Rural Revitalization through Circular Economy

As a key leading enterprise in agricultural industrialization, Yihou Food has maintained close ties with rural areas and farmers since its inception. Li Xiaobing states that over the past twenty years, the company has focused on empowering rural development through industry, deeply integrating the native pig industry with rural revitalization, allowing farmers to share industry benefits.

To enrich and benefit farmers, it is essential to involve them as active participants and beneficiaries. The “China’s First Native Pig Village” Guanhucun is a successful example of industry supporting farmers. Once impoverished, Guanhucun has become a large-scale breeding base under the company’s guidance. The company provides over 110 households with piglets, feed, technical support, and unified procurement, increasing average household income to between 70,000 and 200,000 yuan annually. The village has also restructured land to grow lychee and forage, promoting integrated planting and breeding, which increases income and improves ecology.

Yihou Elephant Grass Planting (Photo provided by interviewee, CNR release)

Building on Guanhucun’s experience, Yihou Food launched the “Hundred Villages, Thousand Households” plan, starting a pilot in Zhanjiang last year. The company selected ten households in each of 100 villages to develop a circular agriculture 2.0 model combining planting and breeding. “Farmers raise about 1,000 native pigs while planting dozens of acres of elephant grass. After fermentation, the grass is used as pig feed, and pig manure fertilizes the grass. This creates a ‘planting–breeding–circulation’ model, solving feed and environmental issues while improving pork quality,” Li Xiaobing explains. “This model reduces costs for farmers, increases their income, provides high-quality raw materials for the company, and offers consumers better pork—benefiting all parties.”

During the pilot, Yihou Food deepened industry-academia-research cooperation, providing full technical guidance, deploying professionals to oversee breeding and planting, and offering price guarantees for purchased pigs, ensuring farmers can “raise well, sell easily, and increase income.” The “company + base + farmers” model also offers stable employment and income channels for farmers.

Li Xiaobing notes that Guangdong has abundant high-quality agricultural resources but often faces issues of “good quality but poor price” or “high yield but poor harvest” due to lack of branding and industrialization. She emphasizes that “branding + industrialization” is the key to rural prosperity.

“Enterprise involvement sets standards and guarantees for agricultural production, reducing blind production,” she says. At the same time, strict quality control builds consumer trust, creating a virtuous cycle of “farmers produce with confidence, consumers buy with assurance, and enterprises develop steadily.” She believes that rural revitalization hinges on industrial revitalization, with leading enterprises leveraging branding, technology, and channels to build shared interests and risk-sharing industry alliances with farmers, injecting vitality and resilience into rural industries.

From deep cultivation of the native pig industry to promoting Cantonese products through “Guang Goods Go Global,” and supporting rural revitalization through industry, Li Xiaobing remains committed to quality and rural roots. She sees the competition in the native pig industry ultimately as a competition of quality, and believes corporate social responsibility is essential for sustainable development. Looking ahead, she has a clear plan: Yihou Food will continue to build brands through quality, promote rural industry development, uphold breeding and preservation principles, continuously refine product quality, and expand the “Hundred Villages, Thousand Households” plan. By scaling up breeding, they aim to preserve local pig breeds and enable more Cantonese native products like Yihou Black Pig Lard to go beyond Guangdong and become renowned nationwide.