Sprouts are very common on the table of our people, it is a "sprout" cultivated from various types of seeds, also known as "live vegetables", because of its fresh and refreshing, rich in a variety of nutrients, loved by many people. Sprouts are simple to grow, and many people will cultivate them at home.
However, the emergence of a female doctor has brought earth-shaking changes to the traditional industry of sprouts, changing the production of sprouts from simple greenhouses to plant factories.
The selling price of sprouts has also increased by 9 times, and these inconspicuous small ingredients can sell for hundreds of yuan a pound, setting up tens of millions of sales.
Tell the story of the three rural prosperity pacesetters to create wealth, and dig up the story of grassroots characters to get rich. In this issue, Ziya Tong Fun Sannong Is An Expert in Getting Rich, telling you the story of Duan Ran, a returned female doctor, who resigned to start a business, opened a plant factory, and sold more than 30 million yuan a year by selling sprouts.
Duan Ran was born in Beijing in 1972, a native of Beijing, and after graduating from Huazhong Agricultural University, he entered the Ministry of Agriculture of the People's Republic of China.
Later, she was transferred to China Seed Group Corporation under the Ministry of Agriculture and began to engage in seed cultivation and international trade. At the age of 30, Duan Ran was admitted to study at public expense and went to the Netherlands to study for a doctorate in the agricultural industry.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="107" > independent entrepreneurship and industrialized development of sprouts</h1>
In 2005, when she was preparing to show her fist after completing her doctorate in the Netherlands, she suddenly got the news that her father had cancer, and Duan Ran gave up the opportunity to return to China and take care of her father while working.
Four years later, his father died, and Duan Ran quit his job at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 2012 to start a business. She established Gio Jinhe Agricultural Development Co., Ltd. in Beijing, which mainly grows sprouts.
At that time, almost all of China's sprouts were produced by family workshops and greenhouses, with limited output and low profits. Duan Ran wanted to introduce foreign modern technology, develop it into modern industrial production, and improve output and quality.
However, purchasing a full range of modern equipment is not an easy task. To set up a factory, the purchase of equipment and personnel costs add up to at least 50 million. For Duan Ran at that time, this was a number that was out of reach.
Although projects such as agricultural carnival expositions and science parks have accumulated some wealth over the years, they are far from enough. So she mortgaged her house in Beijing, borrowed money from relatives and friends, and borrowed money from the bank, and finally raised fifty million. She poured all the money into the sprout factory that was about to start construction.
Beijing Jingcheng Plant Factory
The factory can produce up to 100 tons of sprouts a day, according to 0.7 yuan a catty, a year can sell more than 50 million yuan. In order to provide sufficient seed raw materials, Duan Ran also found special cooperative seeds in Gansu, Hefei, Jilin and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regions.
In 2013, Duan Ran's factory began trial operation, and if it goes well, annual sales can reach tens of millions of yuan. However, the ideal is very beautiful, but the reality gives her a blow.
After a year, Duan Ran not only did not reach tens of millions of sales, but lost more than 2 million yuan. Due to the unstable run-in between intelligent machines and labor, the factory production standard settings are easy to make mistakes, and the original sprouts need to reach a temperature of 23 degrees, but the employees can easily set it to 2.3 degrees during operation.
As a result, about 5 tons of sprouts per day fall short of quality standards for various reasons. These substandard sprouts cannot be sold and can only be given to cattle farms as fodder.
By the end of the year, the factory had lost nearly two million yuan, could not pay wages, and could not repay bank loans, and Duan Ran was anxious.
From a spirited returning doctor to an entrepreneur who failed to invest, with a huge loan and unable to repay, Duan Ran was extremely anxious, and his hair was white overnight.
She slept only four hours a day, worked around the clock on agricultural projects to earn money, and then continued to invest in the cultivation of sprouts.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="120" > find the right woman and solve the sales dilemma</h1>
In 2015, Duan Ran's sprouts finally went on sale, and she carefully selected more than 20 varieties of sprouts to target a supermarket wholesale market in Beijing.
She set up a stall in the market, and the boxes of fresh and tender sprouts were very attractive. But what she didn't expect was that for two or three days in a row, people passing by didn't even look at it, which made her very puzzled.
It turns out that these wholesalers have old customers to take goods at fixed points, and Duan Ran, as a newcomer, is difficult to have customers.
The sprouts that can't be sold cost him an average of about 2500 yuan a day. How can we get a foothold in this wholesale market?
Duan Ran, who did not accept defeat, observed every day and finally had an unexpected gain. She found that most of the market is a husband and wife file, the wife is responsible for collecting money, the husband is responsible for the porting, and the right to speak is in the hands of the woman.
It seems that if you want to sell a product, you have to find the right person.
So she chatted with other stall owners in the market every day, from parents to selling products, everyone is a woman, and there are many common topics.
Gradually, Duan Ran met some stall owner friends. She took the stall owners to her sprout factory to taste the fresh sprouts herself and explain them the cultivation methods and techniques.
Finally, some customers are willing to buy her sprouts, so she has passed on more and more customers.
In 2015, her sales reached more than nine million yuan. In 2016, she opened a branch in Zhengzhou and concocted the production and sales model in Beijing, and her total sales of sprouts in Beijing and Zhengzhou reached more than 10 million yuan. In 2017, she opened branches in Guizhou and Wuhan.
Zhengzhou Ark Plant Factory
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="133" > develop recipes, win-win cooperation, and open up the high-end market</h1>
After the sales channel opened, Duan Ran looked at a new market. She found that hotel catering has always been in a high-end position in the Chinese market, and the cost of cultivating her sprouts is high, and if it is sold too cheaply, the profit is not enough.
Only by entering the higher-end market can you get enough profits. But the idea was quickly rejected.
In hotel catering, sprouts are only used as a side dish and rarely appear as a main course. Therefore, the daily use of ingredients is very small, and in order to facilitate and reduce costs, hotels often buy with other vegetables, and will not send special manpower to purchase the same side dishes.
After getting such a survey result, Duan Ran had an idea in his heart. Since the amount of side dishes is small, why not just make sprouts the protagonist?
So she hired a chef and squatted in the kitchen every day to study the sprout recipe. After some experimentation, Duan Ran and the chef finally developed a table of sprouts based on dishes, she printed the pictures and production methods on the recipe, and also publicized her sprout planting base by the way.
In order to cooperate with the hotel, she also invited someone to explain in the hotel, recommend sprout dishes, and feedback customer evaluations and suggestions to the factory. The staff of this position is jointly cultivated by the sprout factory and the hotel, so as to achieve a win-win situation between the hotel and the plant factory.
In 2017, the sales of Duan Ran's sprouts reached more than 2 million yuan in Beijing hotels, and the total sales in the country reached more than 24 million yuan.
It is this change of thinking that allows her to find business opportunities from the crisis, turn disadvantages into advantages, and get a share in the fierce market competition.
While selling sprouts, Duan Ran also cooperated with 13 agricultural cooperatives in Hebei Province to purchase the vegetables they planted, and the harvested vegetables were uniformly made into clean vegetables through industrial means, and then sold through the wholesale markets, supermarkets, hotels, e-commerce and other channels that had previously sold sprouts.
The clean vegetables produced by Duan Ran solve the problem of consumers' time-consuming and laborious processing of special dishes, and also solve the garbage disposal problems brought about by the national garbage classification trend, so that consumers have no worries about garbage classification.
In 2018, the total sales of Sprouts and Clean Vegetables in DuanRan reached more than 48 million yuan, and through the production and sale of sprouts in Beijing for the packaging and sales of vegetables, radiation drove 1560 farmers around Beijing, which to a certain extent promoted the development of the local vegetable processing industry and the adjustment of the agricultural industrial structure.
At the same time, many peasant households in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of Gansu Province and other places have also increased their household income by giving Duan Ran factory seeds. In 2019, Duan Ran built a new 47-acre sprout vegetable factory in Fangshan District, Beijing.
At present, Duan Ran's company has more than 100 patents, 26 patents for sprouts, more than 1,000 varieties of sprouts that can be produced, and 20 kinds of large-scale production.
As a doctor and entrepreneur, Duan Ran defines her own vegetable growing: she grows vegetables, does not grab rice with farmers, has a high index of sprouts, does not occupy land, and also needs farmers to supply a large number of seeds, and she and farmers have a win-win relationship of cooperation.
Obtaining wealth is only one of the purposes of Duan Ran's entrepreneurship, as an agricultural person, it is more important to provide agriculture with safer and healthier planting technology through modern means, and to ensure food safety.
How do you think about Duan Ran's entrepreneurial path of developing small industries into modern large industries and leading tens of thousands of peasant households to get rich together? Let's discuss it together in the comments section!
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Little meow