According to quality standards, the basic ingredients for mooncake filling are walnuts, almonds, olive kernels, sunflower seeds, and sesame seeds. In traditional northern recipes, pine nuts often replace the sunflower seeds, creating a unique nutty aroma.
Meihekou's pine nut processing industry began in the 1970s. Back then, workers used hammers to crack the shells, with each able to process only about 2.5 kilograms of pine nuts per hour. All these years later, the area now hosts 303 pine nut processing companies. The traditional workshops have evolved into intelligent production lines, with an annual output of pine nuts exceeding ten thousand metric tons.
