Master Kong's senior management appeared at the China Convenience Food Conference, and the epidemic prompted a surge in demand for instant noodles in the market

At the end of last month, the incident of "Master Kong's manager saying that the epidemic is 'Heaven help me'" was exposed, and the society condemned him for issuing such remarks about the epidemic for the sake of sales performance. At the 2021 China Convenience Food Conference held from October 10 to 11, Master Kong's incident once again became a topic of discussion among the industry participants. However, Chen Yingrang, executive president of Master Kong Holdings Limited, who attended the meeting, did not respond to the matter during the meeting. Beiqing-Beijing headline reporter noted that until now, Master Kong has not publicly responded to and apologized for this matter.

According to the previous internal employees of Master Kong, at the critical moment of epidemic prevention and control in Guangdong at the end of June this year, Pan Mou, general manager of the Pearl River Delta Marketing Company of Jiangmen Dingyi Food Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Master Kong Instant Noodles, called the epidemic "Heaven Help Me" at the staff meeting, and even reprimanded the regional head of Zhongshan City for his performance: "Zhongshan has not yet had an epidemic ... Heaven will not help you."

Beiqing-Beijing headline reporters saw from the report released by the China Food Science and Technology Society, the organizer of this year's China Convenience Food Conference, that the epidemic has indeed spawned a surge in demand for instant noodle food in the market. According to the statistics of the Noodle Products Branch of the Chinese Society of Food Science and Technology, the main business income of China's 22 major instant noodle enterprises in 2020 totaled about 61.021 billion yuan, an increase of 10.8% year-on-year; the output was 37.975 billion bales, an increase of 7.02% year-on-year. The report shows that China's instant noodle production fell at a year-on-year high for two consecutive years in 2018 and 2019. In the first five months of this year, China's cumulative output of instant noodles was 2.065 million tons, down 8.01% year-on-year. Only 2020 saw a rebound in between. Statistics from the World Association for Instant Noodles (WINA) also show that in the 2020 world total consumption of instant noodles, China ranked first with a total consumption of 46.35 billion servings of instant noodles, an increase of 20.3% from 38.52 billion in 2016, a new high in 6 years.

Text/Beijing Youth Daily reporter Zhang Qin

Editor/Fan Hongwei