Ex-pat Hunter McGregor has spent the past 11 years living in China and has carved a niche for himself in Shanghai’s enormous food industry importing venison from Canterbury’s Mountain River Venison company.
He ruefully admits he chose a most difficult product to market, one with little familiarity to locals as a protein source and a product often requiring quite different cooking techniques compared to other red meats.
He has worn out shoe leather on the streets of Shanghai visiting restaurants over the past few years, becoming a familiar figure in the early days with his wheeled chilly that contained the meat, which remains something of a curiosity among local chefs and restaurant owners.
He has kept his importing company small, with him and his Chinese wife as partners, employing two delivery workers.
That small scale means McGregor has been able to slowly tune into a market he describes as extremely fast-moving with something that is popular one month just as likely to be out of favour the next.
“For us it has helped to be able to pick up on what chefs are looking for, to take their suggestions on board and go back to Mountain River with ideas for a new cut, a new portion size, maybe new packaging.”
The small size of both that company and his means the response can be quick.
There might be some lessons in his simple model for NZ firms looking to the huge but competitive and fragmented market.
Rather than devoting hundreds of thousands of dollars to fixed-piece campaigns, a suck-it-and-see approach, often employing social media platforms like WeChat, might prove tactically more adaptive, affordable and effective.
His market research is his daily conversations with the chefs and business owners he sits down to tea with during his calls.
The Chinese food service sector is mind bogglingly huge, totalling US$540 billion in sales in 2016 and typically growing at 8-11% a year since 2012.
It is dominated by thousands of small to medium enterprises and while international big brands are moving in, restaurants serving traditional Chinese cuisine continue to be more popular in many cities than restaurants serving overseas fare.
But that is changing as a growing middle class travels. With more than 400,000 Chinese tourists visiting NZ every year, they are starting to appreciate the story that can be told around NZ products including venison.
“They increasingly want to know where their product came from and are prepared to pay a premium to a point for something that is also seen as healthy and sustainably produced.
“The advantage for NZ is that our farming practices are transparent, maybe not perfect, but we are heading in the right direction and the story for deer farming is even better.”
Shanghai, with its levels of personal household wealth and income, is by no means typical of all China but the 25 million population has provided a solid base over the years to build trade.
“We could always sell a lot more if we wanted to do so cheaper but we can’t work on volume. There has to be a level of premium there without pricing yourself off the market.
“The challenge is there, though, on two levels. One is can they afford to buy it to sell to their customers and secondly can they cook it?”
Chinese chefs are typically very traditional but a few restaurants have incorporated venison into menus, with most clients being five-star hotels.
If the job selling a relatively unknown red meat was not already tough enough it is made doubly so by the big lead times required by international hotels for menu formulations and the worldwide phenomena of transient chefs.
The success McGregor has enjoyed usually hangs as much on the relationships with the chefs he has built up as on the product itself.
Continuity of supply and consistency of quality from Mountain River are greatly respected by his clients.
Different cuts tend to work better in different seasons with braised dishes including shanks more popular in winter while raw dishes like carppacio and tartare work over summer.
“And ribs work well all year round.”
While coy on exact amounts he admits most NZ lamb meat marketers are probably selling more in China in a day than he does in a year.
But McGregor also has a level of patience and acceptance that his toil will pay off.
Chinese appetites are becoming more international, fuelled not only by the growing travel experiences. There is also a more experimental millennial generation responsible for 45% of food service industry consumption interested in their food’s sustainability, source and its story.
