This highlights the challenge many Chinese food enterprises will soon have to face.

Product quality is a problem many Chinese enterprises, especially private ones, have been neglecting when they are too eager to make quick and big profits at the expense of quality. As a result, some of them are short-lived.

However, the success of Nanjing Yurun Food Co Ltd has proved the importance of quality in the sustainable development of an enterprise.

Started as a small private food enterprise in 1993, Nanjing Yurun Food Co Ltd has grown into a State-level industrial enterprise, with a fixed asset worth more than 1.3 billion yuan (US$170 million) and a staff of more than 10,000 workers.

"The secret of our success lies in the fact we have taken quality as our lifeline and spared no effort to ensure the high quality of every kind of products we produce," said Zhu.

Thanks to its standardized operation, the company has become one of the first Chinese food enterprises to have passed ISO9001 International Quality Management System, and has been actively practising Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), the international food safety standard. All this has greatly promoted the marketing of its products.

Its sales income multiplied in the past few years and its industrial output value reached 2 billion yuan (US$240 million) in 2000 -- expecting to reach 3 billion yuan (US$36 million) this year.

"Quality is guaranteed by qualified personnel and the use of advanced technology," said Zhu.

Over the years, Yurun Food has conducted various kinds of training programmes for its workers and has invested heavily in such low-temperature meat food technologies as emulsification, pasteurization, vacuum packaging and germ-free packaging to constantly upgrade production techniques and improve quality.

"We are planning to set up a research and development section to develop green food by genetic and biological nutrition technologies, to follow the latest trends in the food industry," said Zhu.

(People's Daily 08/08/2001)