China's 590-year-old pickle maker finds wider market

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The new offerings would have been hard to imagine at Liubiju a few years ago, when the 590-year-old food maker was struggling to stay afloat. After losing more than 15 million…

BEIJING, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) -- For generations, Beijing families have bought Liubiju's sweet pickled garlic to go with hotpot and sweet bean sauce to accompany roast duck. These days, customers at the company's historic Qianmen store can also find peanut-sesame-paste ice cream, vinegar slushies and freshly baked pastries flavored with traditional Chinese condiments.

The new offerings would have been hard to imagine at Liubiju a few years ago, when the 590-year-old food maker was struggling to stay afloat. After losing more than 15 million yuan (about 2.23 million U.S. dollars) in 2021, the company returned to profit, earning over 26 million yuan in 2025, its best result in decades. The recovery followed an overhaul of its products, sales channels and management.

Liubiju's experience offers a window into how China's traditional brands are responding to changing consumer habits. The country's total retail sales of consumer goods rose 1.1 percent in the first nine months of 2026, while online food sales grew 15.8 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Founded in 1436, Liubiju had long relied on the appeal of its pickled vegetables and sauces, products closely associated with Beijing cuisine but less familiar elsewhere in China. Their production also imposed limits on growth.

At its factory in southern Beijing, more than 2,000 earthenware vats stand in neat rows, half-buried in the ground. Workers use long wooden paddles to stir the vegetables and sauce, turning loads weighing 50 kilograms or more. The company's sweet pickled garlic undergoes roughly 150 days of fermentation, during which workers must repeatedly roll the sealed jars by hand.

Such labor-intensive methods help preserve Liubiju's distinctive flavors, but leave little room to increase production at short notice.

When Yu Jiangfu joined Liubiju as marketing director in 2020, the company's core business had been losing money for years, with rental income helping cover the shortfall.

Yu, now the…

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