---
title: "Interview with Zhou Jinsong: Jinzai's Thirty Years, Honest Craftsmanship Creates Great Taste"
description: "He carried dreams and was the first to leave Pingjiang, over decades driving 100,000 Pingjiang people to produce soy products, flour products, and other snack foods nationwide. He opened his arms, traded shares for growth, and within a few years grew the company's output from tens of millions to hundreds of millions. He looked ahead, attracted resources with his brand, and within months secured 300 million yuan in investment, the largest strategic investment in China's snack food industry in recent years. Zhou Jinsong, chairman of Hunan Huawen Food and founder of Jinzai Xiaoyu, is thriving in his career and pragmatic in life."
author: "陈赛"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2017-12-11"
language: "en"
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# Interview with Zhou Jinsong: Jinzai's Thirty Years, Honest Craftsmanship Creates Great Taste

> He carried dreams and was the first to leave Pingjiang, over decades driving 100,000 Pingjiang people to produce soy products, flour products, and other snack foods nationwide. He opened his arms, traded shares for growth, and within a few years grew the company's output from tens of millions to hundreds of millions. He looked ahead, attracted resources with his brand, and within months secured 300 million yuan in investment, the largest strategic investment in China's snack food industry in recent years. Zhou Jinsong, chairman of Hunan Huawen Food and founder of Jinzai Xiaoyu, is thriving in his career and pragmatic in life.

He carried dreams and was the first to leave Pingjiang, over decades driving 100,000 Pingjiang people to produce soy products, flour products, and other snack foods nationwide.
He opened his arms, traded shares for growth, and within a few years grew the company's output from tens of millions to hundreds of millions.
He looked ahead, attracted resources with his brand, and within months secured 300 million yuan in investment, the largest strategic investment in China's snack food industry in recent years.
Zhou Jinsong, chairman of Hunan Huawen Food and founder of Jinzai Xiaoyu.
Thriving in his career and pragmatic in life, he is Zhou Jinsong, chairman of Hunan Huawen Food and founder of Jinzai Xiaoyu.
At first meeting, Zhou Jinsong seems like a friendly neighbor, plainly dressed and straightforward in speech, with none of the aura of an entrepreneur who has started businesses for decades and is worth hundreds of millions.
But when you meet his gaze, you can clearly feel from his clear eyes his calm confidence in his career, his persistent self-assurance in his ideals, and his positive, upward-looking strength for the future!
**Starting from Scratch: 36 Jin of Soybeans as the Foundation**
A long-lasting brand is the lifelong dream of every entrepreneur. The "Jinzai" brand name is derived from Zhou Jinsong's name "Jin," and its brand history can be traced back 30 years.
In 1987, although he was a descendant of a revolutionary martyr (his great-grandfather died in the Pingjiang Uprising), in Pingjiang, a nationally designated poverty-stricken county, Zhou Jinsong had to interrupt his studies to reduce the burden on his family and help make ends meet. But what could a young, frail boy do?
At that time, Pingjiang, due to historical tradition, had many small workshops processing bayberries, preserved fruits, and candied fruits, but there was no stable and mature sales system. He decided to purchase these products and deliver them to shops in various townships.
Fortunately, his uncle gave him a broken bicycle as transportation, and even more fortunately, the surrounding shops trusted and supported this young man who delivered goods to their doors. After a day of travel and sales, Zhou Jinsong sold all the 30 yuan worth of products, earning 20 yuan in profit according to market rates.
For Zhou Jinsong at that time, this was an overwhelming sense of happiness, strengthening his confidence to continue. From then on, regardless of season, wind, or rain, along the Miluo River, in front of Mufu Mountain, and on streets and alleys, Zhou Jinsong was seen riding his bicycle from village to village selling goods, averaging over 100 kilometers a day, often missing meals and settling for two steamed buns.
In this way, Zhou Jinsong truly visited every village and every shop in Pingjiang. The still young teenager thus wrestled with reality. By 1989, in just two years, Zhou Jinsong had worn out five bicycles. This energetic and diligent young man left a deep impression on many shop and food factory owners, becoming a valuable resource for his future entrepreneurship.
According to the "Pingjiang County Annals": "The food industry is a traditional industry in Pingjiang with a long history. During the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, Changshou dried tofu was listed as a tribute to the imperial court." After being listed as a tribute, it spread throughout the country and became famous worldwide.
According to the "Pingjiang County Agricultural Annals," excerpted from the Hunan Provincial Archives: In 1915 (the 4th year of the Republic of China), at the 13th San Francisco World Expo, China was invited to participate. Hunan sought new breakthroughs at this expo, and Pingjiang exhibited black tea, atractylodes, and dried tofu (dried bean curd).
One of Zhou Jinsong's uncles was engaged in the production of Pingjiang dried tofu. He had observed Zhou Jinsong's diligence and hard work over the past two years and was pleased, deciding to teach him the technique of making dried tofu.
Zhou Jinsong's idea coincided with his uncle's. Although business was good now, he was ultimately just helping others make money. If he could learn the production technology of dried tofu and start his own factory, wouldn't he have greater room for development?
He gladly entered his uncle's factory, and with his intelligence and eagerness to learn, he quickly became familiar with and proficient in the entire process of making dried tofu—to this day, if Zhou Jinsong goes down to the workshop, he is thoroughly familiar with and adept at every process and operation, including soaking beans, grinding, boiling pulp, curdling, and roasting and marinating.
**After fully mastering the production process of dried tofu, Zhou Jinsong decided to start his own business. But where would the capital come from?**
Just then, the family's fat pig was sold for over 300 yuan. At that time, a fat pig in the countryside could be said to be a family's annual security: buying production materials, clothes, shoes, and paying children's tuition... After much coaxing, Zhou Jinsong's mother agreed to give this "huge sum" to her son to start a business.
**Starting a business is easier said than done.** After buying a stone mill, cloth bags, wooden barrels, seasonings, and other items, the 300-plus yuan was almost gone. Fortunately, they harvested 36 jin of the most important raw material—soybeans—from their own field ridges.
Soybeans, oh soybeans, these golden, yellow fruits, these after-meal snacks, these gifts for visiting relatives and friends in the countryside—for Zhou Jinsong, they were the seed of his thirty-year entrepreneurial journey to build a century-old enterprise, the cornerstone of his true career!
Starting with these 36 jin of soybeans, he soaked, ground, curdled, filtered, cut into pieces, marinated and seasoned... The dried tofu he made sold out the same day, earning 60 yuan.
In this way, by the end of the year, Zhou Jinsong had recovered all his initial investment—and returned the money from the fat pig to his mother. From then on, his parents, feeling sorry for their son, helped out in his workshop day after day, and the whole family embarked on the path of making dried tofu.
From then on, Zhou Jinsong's dried tofu was available in all shops in Pingjiang, and supply could not meet demand. He could sell about 100 yuan a day. Two or three years later, following his fellow townsmen and elders, he gradually sold products to Yueyang and Changsha.
**Daring to Be First: Conquering the Central Plains**
By 1994, competition in the Pingjiang dried tofu industry had intensified. Zhou Jinsong, having started late and being small in scale, had no competitive advantage, and the market in Yueyang and Changsha was difficult to develop. **He began to think: should he avoid direct competition and, with his skills, leave Pingjiang, leave Changsha, even leave Hunan, to open up new markets?**
But at that time, no one in his family opposed it, because he was the only male child in three generations. His most beloved grandmother said, "It's okay to have difficulties, as long as you have food to eat"—in those difficult years, his grandmother had eaten rice bran and wild grass. But for Zhou Jinsong, who had already shown his edge in the industry, eating plain white rice was no longer his goal. He had a bigger dream, and the dream was beckoning him from afar.
On December 24, 1994, Christmas Eve in the West. Riding his dream, Zhou Jinsong set out from Changsha, passed through Yichang and Xiangyang, and finally chose to settle in Luoyang. Why Luoyang?
There were both capability and market considerations. At that time, there were few Pingjiang people in Luoyang, and Zhou Jinsong was confident in his skills. He wanted to trade space for time, and in such a completely blank market, rely on craftsmanship, product, and taste to avoid competition and focus on development.
He acted on his thoughts. He arrived in Luoyang on December 31, and on January 2, 1995, he rented a space of about 100 square meters at 60 yuan per month and began making dried tofu.
The place Zhou Jinsong rented was chosen with care. Because the landlord himself made tofu, he didn't need to spend time and money to set up a tofu factory; he could directly take semi-finished products from the landlord for processing. In this way, Zhou Jinsong used the landlord's semi-finished products daily, marinated and processed them himself, and then took the bus to sell them at nearby school gates. Because the products were good and cheap, and suited to the market, he achieved daily production and daily sales from the start.
From the Gregorian New Year to the Lunar New Year, Zhou Jinsong soon became too busy. He brought several helpers from Pingjiang to Luoyang to increase investment and expand scale. The dried tofu factory became increasingly prosperous; during busy times, it was "no sleep until the rooster crows." This delicious and healthy snack also became popular among students. For this, Zhou Jinsong bought a tricycle specifically to deliver goods to about 30 to 40 school shops in the area.
In this way, Zhou Jinsong, regardless of season or time, worked hard and managed to establish a foothold in a foreign land. During this period, the landlord of his dried tofu factory found that his tofu wasn't selling as well as Zhou Jinsong's dried tofu, so he simply transferred his tofu factory to Zhou Jinsong and became a distributor of his dried tofu instead.
In 1997, Zhou Jinsong's output value broke through the million yuan mark, and he registered a trademark with his name and portrait. Gradually, fellow Pingjiang people learned that Zhou Jinsong was doing well in Luoyang, and many began to follow suit, investing in factories in Luoyang, Zhengzhou, Zhumadian, and other places, producing and selling flour products and soy products.
**According to incomplete statistics, as the first person to take dried tofu out of Pingjiang and Hunan, at its peak, Zhou Jinsong drove 100,000 people to establish snack food enterprises across the country.**
What is commendable is that in Luoyang at that time, whether they were peers, competitors, or upstream and downstream enterprises, whenever they had problems—technical, operational, or financial—they would come to Zhou Jinsong, and he would provide selfless help.
**"Peaches and plums do not speak, yet a path is worn beneath them."** Those entrepreneurs who later left Pingjiang also sincerely admired Zhou Jinsong's honesty and regarded him as their "big brother." They actively exchanged and cooperated with each other, promoting the planning of Pingjiang people's food industry outside to about 30 billion yuan. Meanwhile, Pingjiang's leisure snack food industry also developed rapidly and gained national fame.
In this way, Zhou Jinsong began to seek new opportunities and continuously expand his industrial territory. He set up large-scale factories in Shenyang, Chengdu, Yiwu, and other places. The extensive expansion initially achieved double harvests in sales and profits.
**Attracting Talent and Gathering Wisdom: Creating Brilliance by Dongting Lake**
In 2009, because the industrial distribution was too scattered and competition intensified, the sequelae of management loss of control and declining efficiency began to appear in Zhou Jinsong's original extensive expansion. At this point, Zhou Jinsong had to contract and seek change, launching bold reforms, transferring inefficient assets for contraction, and concentrating superior resources on the R&D and sales of flavored leisure products.
**A strong sense of career drove him to start a second business.** What to do? Born in the land of fish and rice, and growing up by Dongting Lake, after some research, Zhou Jinsong decided to rely on his years of seasoning R&D experience to enter the fish snack market—with abundant resources, high market recognition, and almost blank markets outside Hunan and Hubei, offering enormous development space.
At that time, there were already over 20 factories in Yueyang making fish snacks. Zhou Jinsong used his own process and formula to trial-produce a batch of fish snacks and gave them to industry clients for tasting, and they received unanimous approval and praise.
At this point, Zhou Jinsong was no longer the young man trying to reduce the burden on his family, nor just a good husband and good son trying to make his family better off. He had a bigger dream and a broader mind. He had a clear understanding of himself: his strengths lay in perseverance and seasoning R&D. To make his second venture flourish and last, he could no longer fight alone; he needed to attract talent and gather wisdom, and work as a team.
From 2011 to the present, Zhou Jinsong has multiple times introduced talents and enterprises in marketing, production, management, capital operation, and strategic synergy as "partners" of the company by transferring equity, jointly starting businesses and seeking development.
As the "soul" of the company, Zhou Jinsong's more than 20 years of experience in leisure food, his reputation for honesty in the industry, and his forward-looking strategic vision and broad-mindedness are the most important reasons for attracting "partners" to join and cooperate sincerely.
Their joining was like adding wings to a tiger, enabling Huawen to develop rapidly. Through meticulous market cultivation, the company's sales grew from several million yuan to tens of millions and then hundreds of millions, a hundredfold increase.
To create a leisure and happy brand image, Huawen Food specially hired a professional consulting agency to plan brand promotion programs and invited famous entertainment show host Wang Han as the brand ambassador.
After communicating with Zhou Jinsong, Wang Han was deeply moved by his "honest" philosophy and even personally wrote advertising copy for the company, interpreting the company's "honest" culture with heart.
And through Wang Han's mouth, the slogan "**Jinzai Thick Dried Tofu, Honest Chinese Taste**"—carrying the company's philosophy and excellent traditional culture—quickly spread among consumers and received countless praises.
To improve the production efficiency of soy products and enhance R&D and quality control, Zhou Jinsong led his team to Japan in the east, Australia in the south, and Germany in the west. After several years, they finally developed a customized automatic packaging machine with equipment manufacturers, solving the automatic packaging problem that had plagued the industry for years. Through technological upgrading and equipment R&D, the number of workers was halved, while per capita production efficiency increased fourfold.
In addition, by selecting raw materials and refining technology, the company greatly improved quality, increased output, and reduced costs in many aspects of the production process, and even independently developed low-temperature curdling technology for tofu.
Professor Zhao Liangzhong, director of the Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Soy Products and a well-known domestic soy product expert, was greatly surprised after learning about it: "**I didn't expect you to develop this technology. The temperature control at the critical point of low-temperature curdling is crucial; too high or too low is counterproductive. Only at this temperature point is the yield highest and quality best.**"
In terms of fish snack products, although they have already become the "champion" of leisure fish products nationwide, and the taste and quality have been recognized by consumers and the market, Zhou Jinsong is not satisfied. He almost harshly requires the team to put quality first and continuously optimize and improve.
From wild-caught small fish in the ocean to delicious and chewy leisure fish snacks, Jinzai Xiaoyu goes through 5 screenings throughout the entire process to ensure that what reaches consumers is complete, clean, headless, and free of other impurities—genuine small fish. This alone increases the company's cost by about 3%, but through large-scale procurement and automated production, the company ultimately offsets this cost and gives consumers value.
Looking back on the journey, it has been 30 years since selling leisure food in 1987. Zhou Jinsong, who once flew away from Pingjiang for his dream, now embraces the land with enthusiasm. He invested 100 million yuan to build the Huawen Food Industrial Park in Wushi, Pingjiang, covering 176 mu, with domestic leading technology, realizing his life legend.
**Strategizing: Looking to the World**
Today's Huawen, with its main product of leisure fish products firmly ranking first in the industry and its main product of soy products ranking in the top five in the industry, is on a strong upward trend. Its brands "**Jinzai**" and "**Boweiyuan**" have become well-known brands in the industry.
Currently, the company cooperates with over 1,000 distributors, with a marketing network covering the whole country, and products are sold to overseas markets such as the United States and Canada.
**"Manufacturing safe, delicious, and convenient leisure food and conveying the life philosophy of 'simple, free, and happy' has always been Huawen's corporate vision."**
Zhou Jinsong said that to create a leisure and happy brand image, Huawen Food specially hired a professional consulting agency to plan brand promotion programs, invited famous entertainment show host Wang Han as the brand ambassador, produced corporate promotional videos, and invested over ten million yuan in TV, internet, and other media. Huawen's "Jinzai" and "Boweiyuan" have become strong brand models in the leisure food industry, with the company's brand awareness and reputation continuously improving, and brand influence gradually strengthening.
These market performances have attracted the enthusiasm of consumers, the praise of peers, and naturally the attention of well-known domestic investment institutions.
**In 2016, in just a few months, Huawen Food signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Jiawo Group, under Legend Holdings, and received 300 million yuan in investment from Jiawo Group.**
**This is the largest strategic investment in the domestic leisure food field in recent years.**
When asked about the reason for investing in Jinzai Xiaoyu, Chen Shaopeng, chairman of Jiawo Group, said: "Huawen Food is a good company with a solid foundation, strong development momentum, and a leading position in the industry. Chairman Zhou Jinsong is a benevolent and honest person with rich industry experience, and he is a visionary and ambitious entrepreneur. Jiawo Group hopes that through this strategic cooperation with Huawen Food, we can build Huawen Food into a leading leisure food brand enterprise in China and provide Chinese consumers with more delicious and healthy leisure food."
On May 10 this year, the National Development and Reform Commission, together with the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Commerce, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, and the Food and Drug Administration jointly held the first "**China Brand Day**" event. CCTV Finance, together with the National Development and Reform Commission, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, and other ministries, held the launch ceremony of the "CCTV China Brand List" in Beijing, announcing the first batch of shortlisted names for the "CCTV China Brand List." **The "Jinzai" brand was shortlisted in the food and beverage category of the "CCTV China Brand List."**
Three thousand years of Hunan cuisine, twenty years of classic inheritance, achieving an output value of 3 billion yuan in the next three years and entering the capital market—this is Zhou Jinsong's **"small goal."**
From selling food in 1987 to now, a full 30 years, Zhou Jinsong feels that he and the Huawen Food he founded are just getting started on the road to promoting Chinese Hunan cuisine culture.
**"The wind is strong, the pine is even stronger; honesty brings calm."** Next, he and his team will take "**inheriting Chinese cuisine culture**" as their mission, based on tradition, looking to the world, and striving to build the company into a globally influential leisure food company.
To truly achieve this goal, in addition to keeping up with advanced trends and strengthening international cooperation in talent introduction, equipment R&D, and process breakthroughs, Zhou Jinsong revealed that they will soon explore internationalization strategies, starting from the upstream, from laying out overseas raw material bases, and actively building an international supply chain.
**"In the future, Jinzai will definitely be an enterprise that on the one hand has traditional Chinese characteristics and on the other hand has distinct international characteristics!"**
Source: Hunan Food Industry Public Service Platform
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