Analysis of agricultural product prices, supply chains, corporate behavior, and industry trends.
At the start of 2024, farmer protests spread like wildfire across Europe, beginning in Germany. During the peak of the protests in mid-January, more than 30,000 farmers drove over 5,000 tractors from across Germany to demonstrate in Berlin. The immediate trigger was the German government’s announcement at the end of…
Over a year ago, the entire Foodthink team “usurped the nest“, taking over the community vegetable shop of the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. In a single day, we took full responsibility for all shop operations and achieved such great sales results that we won our “wager”. The first “Occupy the…
Foodthink’s Take With the Lunar New Year approaching, who wouldn’t want to prepare a lavish New Year’s Eve feast with minimal time and effort? Riding this wave, various pre-prepared meals have once again trended across online shopping platforms—for just over a thousand yuan, you can bring home a full set…
I. The buyers didn’t come this year On 13 December 2023, in Huichang County, Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province—the heart of the Gannan navel orange production area—Liao Hai, born in the nineties, and his mother, Aunt Zou, were preparing to start harvesting. Early that morning, his mother had gathered over a dozen…
In this episode, we explore the wonderful world of cheese—the ultimate fermented food—and share the story of Liu Yang, the founder of Bule Cheese and a true Chinese cheese artisan. A Beijinger with a background in IT, Liu Yang stumbled upon the art of stirring milk and making cheese while…
In May, I quit my job and left Beijing for a while, heading to the Zhiliangtian Ecological Farm in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, where I lived for two months. To my surprise, I spent every single day of my first month there drinking. Two-thirds of the beer in the farm’s coffee…
Imagine the vegetables on your plate didn’t come from a farmer with mud-stained hands working in a field, but were instead a technological marvel grown inside a vertical farming tower made of metal and plastic. How would you react? While in Berlin in 2018, I was captivated by the vertical…
Foodthink says In early August this year, Wuchang in Heilongjiang suffered rare torrential rains and floods, with approximately 40% of the local 2.5 million mu of farmland submerged. Two months after the disaster, livestreamers selling Wuchang rice appeared on e-commerce platforms. Set against a backdrop of lush, harvested fields, they…
“When the yellow croaker arrives, ten thousand taels of gold follow.” Wild large yellow croakers are traditional banquet staples and auspicious dishes in Zhejiang and Shanghai. Along the Chinese coastline, perhaps no fish has experienced a more turbulent fate than the large yellow croaker. In October this year, I witnessed…
Power generated above, crops grown below—one piece of land yielding two streams of income. “Agrivoltaics” claims to deliver multiple benefits, including clean electricity, efficient land use, agricultural modernisation, and rural development; it is often viewed as a win-win technological innovation to simultaneously address food, energy, and climate issues. According to…
