Fei county stretches hawthorn from seasonal fruit into a year-round industry chain
On the morning of Nov 3, container trucks lined up in the yard of Fei county Wangyuanwai Food Co in Fei county, Linyi, East China's Shandong province, loaded with neatly stacked cans of hawthorn bound for New Zealand — a vivid marker of how far the county's hawthorn industry has traveled.
Fei county grows 75,300 hectares — 11.3 million mu — of hawthorn, and the fruit is being revalued through the coordinated development of the industrial chain, the value chain and the innovation chain: from fresh fruit sold at about 4 yuan a kilogram to candied hawthorn skewers at 12 yuan each, from simple slices to 10,000-tonne hawthorn wine lines, from domestic e-commerce to overseas tables.
The chain now stretches in several directions at once. Furun Food runs a fully automated candied hawthorn line — washing, drying, sorting, pitting, skewering, sugar-coating and cold-chain distribution — with total storage of 22,000 tonnes, an annual output of more than 7 million skewers and 500 tonnes of local hawthorn consumed each year; its skewers, made in cooperation with the popular Jiangsu brand Quandefu, rank among the top three sellers on e-commerce platforms. Longyu village in Dongmeng town reported peak yields of more than 3,000 kilograms per mu this year, with fresh fruit going to cold storage, slices selling at about 16 yuan a kilogram, and canneries taking the rest for export. Wangyuanwai Food, once a fresh-fruit storage and trading business, now produces about 1,000 tonnes of canned hawthorn a year for 36 countries and regions including the European Union, Russia and Japan, consuming 5,000 tonnes of local fruit. Wenhe Liquor has moved the chain into beverages, registering a hawthorn technology company and investing 200 million yuan ($28.2 million) in French equipment for a wine plant designed to produce 10,000 tonnes a year and consume as much raw fruit, while Lunan Pharmaceutical Group has launched a hawthorn prebiotic drink combining traditional food-medicine concepts with modern gut-microbiome science.
Cold-chain infrastructure underpins the extension. The county agriculture and rural affairs bureau has built 17 dedicated cold stores with about 200,000 cubic meters of capacity in the core hawthorn areas of Dongmeng and Datianzhuang, with pre-cooling and sorting facilities and construction subsidies, cutting rot losses at harvest peaks. Bai Jintong, deputy director of the bureau, said the measures target the weakest links of the chain.
Branding lifts the value chain. Amplifying the "Fei county hawthorn" national geographical indication, the county has run a candied hawthorn design competition, a logo and image solicitation and a special promotion at the 2026 Shandong agricultural trade fair, and at the 11th China Fruit Industry Brand Conference in 2026 the brand was valued at 2.344 billion yuan. The innovation chain is advancing in parallel: 12 processing entities have been cultivated and more than 20 specialty products developed, from freeze-dried hawthorn and soft candies to hawthorn wine.
Editor：韩蒙蒙