Watching the steps carefully as he climbs the stairs, Chen Zemin has almost no interaction with his peers at a fabulous party for big names in business. It should come as no surprise: Chen has always shied away from the spotlight.

Or maybe he is just used to the quiet life. Before becoming a businessman in his 50s, Chen spent 30 years as a doctor, examining patients under a surgery lamp.

The 64-year-old Chen is the chairman of Zhengzhou Sanquan Co Ltd, a major fast-frozen food producer. It is said that of every 10 fast frozen dumplings in the country, five bear the Sanquan name.

The company now holds nearly one-fifth of the fast frozen food market in China, making over 3,500 tons of sweet dumpling a day. Last year's sales crossed 2 billion yuan.

And unlike his low public profile, commercials from Sanquan products are constantly seen on the country's major television networks and on screens outside parks and shopping centers in metropolises and second-tier cities.

Doctor to inventor

For most part of his life, Chen has been called doctor, although he is also famous among friends and relatives as Mr Fix-all and an amateur cook. In his younger days he often put down his white coat after work and made sweet dumplings, which he would send around the neighborhood as gifts. Besides making sweet dumplings, his hobbies included repairing all kinds of home appliances and cutting other people's hair.

But in the late 1980s, cooking became more than a hobby. At the time, China's reform, which started in the southern coastal cities, had spread to Henan, China's most populous province. People were encouraged to take part-time jobs to earn more money and live better. Many people with the entrepreneurial spirit spotted an opportunity and started to do business. Chen wanted to be one of them.

It was an idea that had been in his mind for years, he recalls. Working as a doctor at a local hospital, he was well respected and earned a decent salary. But "what if my two sons get married, have children, and need to get a house?"

So he quit his job as the head of a local hospital and opened a snack store with 15,000 yuan borrowed from a neighbor who sold fruit. Chen began by making ice cream.

His business later expanded to fast frozen food after he invented a new way to keep sweet dumplings, a popular festival food in southern China, which can go bad easily. Chen found that with a special freezing method, the food could be transported and preserved.

He named his product Sanquan, which in Chinese is the short term for the Third Plenary Meeting of the 11th Central Committee of CPC, Communist Party of China, to express his gratitude for the reform and opening up. The plenary meeting in 1978 officially launched the reform and opening up policy which created China's economic miracle

Marketing campaigns

Sanquan's commercials often feature a middle-aged lady cooking for the family in a warm atmosphere. But Chen's early ads often took place in a cold winter setting because the best season for selling the food is the Lantern Festival, the 15th of the first lunar month usually in February or March, when people, especially in southern China, traditionally celebrate by eating sweet dumplings.

After his company earned a strong reputation among local people in Henan, he shipped the sweet dumplings to Beijing in search of a larger market. He introduced his products to shopping centers and supermarkets in the capital. To explain to the northern Chinese who are not familiar with sweet dumplings, he often took a table tennis to use as a visual comparison.

He also remembers when he shipped the food to Shenyang, a city in cold northeast China, he carried the product in a car, part of which was changed into a refrigerator and powered by a generator designed by Chen himself. Staying at roadside hotels, Chen would call the local traders one by one, and invite them to taste his product.

The marketing campaign helped bring sweet dumplings to northern China.

Analysts said his invention came at a good time: urbanites had only started to use refrigerators, and cold chain logistics had only started to be used by retailers. If the product had come out earlier, they say, there would not been such a big market.

Sanquan later expanded from the sweet dumplings to other fast frozen foods, mostly traditional Chinese food such as jiaozi, or Chinese dumpling, and zongzi, or Chinese rice dumplings. Today the company also makes instant rice.

Competition ahead

When Chen was concentrating on developing his own brand, his competitors grew quietly. His neighbors, first shocked at seeing the traffic jams of carriages coming throughout the country to purchase Sanquan products, later followed Chen's lead by starting similar businesses. Over 30 brands started to sell the same thing the next year.

Chen was angry at first. He believed these people had infringed on his intellectual properties and he hired lawyers to sue them. But he soon found that there were too many people making the same products. "The law cannot punish the mass," he says.

On the other hand, the market for fast frozen products was increasing. Chinese people, rising urbanites especially, were getting too busy to cook. And refrigerators, once taken as a luxury in the houses of the minority elites, had become a common household appliance.

"I could not meet the market demand no matter how much I expanded," Chen says. After a short period of hesitation, he started to allow people to produce the product and even shared business information with competitors.

Now, the provincial capital Zhengzhou is known as China's capital of fast-frozen food. The province holds 40 percent of the fast frozen food market in China.

Chen now no longer manages the company's day-to-day operations and just holds the title of chairman.

Despite all the glory of being the leader of fast frozen food, the company still has the typical problems of a family business in China. The company has planned to list on the stock market several times, but has failed. The reason, according to some analysts, is that Chen and his two sons control too high a stake in the company, with over 80 percent of shares.

"Things will change gradually," he says, declining to reveal any more detail in his own quiet, polite way. As for life after retirement: "My task is simply to walk around, look around, and give some suggestions if necessary."

(China Daily 11/26/2007 page12)