In the golden autumn season, coinciding with the "combination of two festivals", the traditional Chinese famous mooncake has also ushered in the peak sales season.
Speaking of mooncakes, Shanghainese will not fail to mention the Apricot Blossom Building.
Inheriting innovation and striving for excellence, the time-honored brand carries the crystallization of the cake-making skills of generations of people, and also undertakes the historical mission of passing on the traditional festival culture.
A few days ago, the reporter visited the factory of Xinghualou in Pujiang Town, looking for the secret of the century-old brand to maintain its youth forever.
The core of Xinghualou Cantonese mooncake production pays attention to 16 processes and 8 key control points, and it is necessary to produce 1 million to 1.2 million mooncakes a day. During this time, three 'tunnel furnaces' with a total length of 38 meters each went into full swing to bake.
On the assembly line, the dough cake package "core" shape, the moon cake queue into the oven, into the cooling tower, and finally through the mechanical arm automatic sorting and packing ... A series of automated operations combined with a standard ISO quality system have brought a new upgrade to Shanghai's time-honored brand.
Shen Quanhua, the fifth generation of non-hereditary heirs of the Cantonese mooncake making technology of Xinghualou, said that in addition to the traditional Wuren mooncakes that are still handmade, 98% of the mooncakes in Xinghualou have been mechanized production and packaging.
In the production workshop of Xinghua Building, everything on the automated assembly line is orderly, clean and tidy.
Through the division of the production process, the front end of the product is the filling dough kneading production area. Different sizes of molds, different fillings of mooncakes, divided into categories directly made by machines. After an average temperature of 225 °C to 285 °C, an average of 15 minutes of baking, the aromatic mooncakes are freshly baked.
After finishing baking, the mooncake team passes through a rotating cooling tower up to 4.5 meters high, allowing it to cool to room temperature within 35 minutes.
Finally, the mooncakes are individually packed and automatically sorted and packed by several robotic arms.
Walking into the newly established e-commerce center this year, the anchors with goods are pre-heating sales of net red mooncakes through multiple platforms, and a live broadcast every day has become the standard for the daily work of the e-commerce department.
According to reports, the 130 stores in the Shanghai area of Xinghualou have realized the self-delivery system. The e-commerce department will also introduce more than 60 intelligent robots to participate in the intelligent sorting and distribution of products in the warehouse, and the intelligence of the Internet of Things is helping traditional time-honored brands to achieve a full line of hardware and software upgrades.
This year's xinghualou's e-commerce version of the mooncake packaging has also been carefully improved.
The famous Shanghai Chinese painter Hang Xiying specially designed and painted the heavy color Chinese painting "Mid-Autumn Moon, Chang'e Running Moon" with a strong national atmosphere, and the Apricot Blossom Building used it as the initial pattern of the moon cake packaging.
The face of Chang'e's sister, a special e-commerce provider, is a 3D stereoscopic imaging, and the person in charge quipped: "This is a refined high-value 'net red face' Chang'e." ”
The long-established Xinghualou also launched a number of new flavors including wine heart, cheese, milk tea, Chao Ren and other series in this year's mooncake season, realizing the gorgeous transformation of "national tide" and fashion.
In the first half of this year, the sales performance of Xinghualou bucked the trend, and sales increased by about 70 million yuan year-on-year. The e-commerce sales model has really developed since 2017, with pure e-commerce sales exceeding 130 million yuan in 2019 and the basic plate of mooncake sales in 2020 expected to reach 150 million yuan.