Product quality consistency makes Tsingtao Brewery a global success

Tsingtao Brewery's beer is probably one of the best-known Chinese beverage brands in the world. The century-old company said it is the strict standards that have laid the foundation for its success.

The brewery was established in 1903 in Qingdao, a coastal city in East China's Shandong province. Standardization has been a golden rule from the very start, according to company officials.

Because of its high quality, the company won a gold medal at the Munich International Exposition in 1906.

In 1964, Tsingtao's brewing methods were adopted by the Chinese government as the standard for its beer industry. As time goes by, the brewery has further improved its standards to make even better beer.

The company said it has now adopted 1,800 testing procedures to make sure that every drop of beer it produces has the perfect taste for which the brand is known.

To ensure products from its 60-plus breweries have the same quality, all of them follow the same standards in aspects including raw materials, brewing, equipment, staff training and management.

For example, every grain of rice it uses to make beer is husked within three days of the start of the brewing process, according to Tsingtao, and all the water it uses goes through more than 50 different tests before brewing begins.

Company officials said Tsingtao has a system for ensuring quality in every stage, ranging from development and production to packaging and sales.

The company also attaches great importance to building up expert teams to ensure that these strict standards are followed.

It has China's only national key lab of beer biological fermentation engineering, which is staffed by a team of 17 researchers with master's degrees and six doctoral-level employees.

It employs one third of the master brewers working in China's beer industry and it boasts 23 top-class beer tasters, all of whom are national-level beer judges.

The company not only ensures its products reach Chinese national quality levels, but also brews beer in strict accordance with the standards set by the United States' Food and Drug Administration, as well as European food safety regulations.

It is because of the consistent quality results from standardization that Tsingtao's sales have been steadily growing overseas.

Last year, its sales grew 8 percent in Western Europe, 14 percent in Latin American countries and 45 percent in Asia-Pacific countries.

With a commitment to quality and a respect for tradition, Tsingtao has become the No 1 beer in China and the No 1 Chinese beer in America, said the brewery on its website.

According to the China's National Image World Report, Tsingtao is the only Chinese brand that is better known in developed countries than in developing ones.

lifusheng@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/27/2017 page12)