Qingquan Sweet Potato's Huang Rongqing Takes Taiwan Sweet Potatoes to the Global Market
Taiwan sweet potatoes go abroad, so delicious that customers chase after them! "The sales channels are all set up, it's production that can't keep up!" Huang Rongqing, chairman of the Qingquan Sweet Potato Production Cooperative, which is based in a coastal village in Changhua yet looks to the whole world, speaks of his family's sweet potatoes with a tone that is both proud and troubled.
In the field, a sweet potato harvester imported from Japan advances slowly, and one sweet potato after another emerges fresh from the soil, moving up along the conveyor belt, where workers on the machine carefully sort and grade them before placing them into plastic baskets. "For exports and the relatively high-end market, we use this machine for harvesting, so the sweet potatoes won't bump and break their skin," Huang Rongqing explains. Freshly dug sweet potatoes have the thinnest skin, and once rubbed and damaged they easily turn black and don't keep well.
Have you eaten the steamed sweet potatoes sold at 7-11? Those sweet potatoes, with their clean skins and soft, fragrant insides like melting gold, are supplied by Qingquan. Insisting on his standards, Huang Rongqing requires all contract farmers to keep production and sales records, and the sweet potatoes go through strict selection and a washing process, treating this ordinary agricultural product so familiar to Taiwanese people with the highest standards.
After washing off all the mud, sweet potatoes not only enter the home and occupy the most prominent spot in convenience stores, becoming a sought-after healthy meal replacement, but also march into the world market, shining brightly in Singapore and Hong Kong, China. Growing in poor soil yet tenacious in vitality, striving all the way to go abroad and make their mark, the fate of Taiwan sweet potatoes is so closely fitted and tightly bound to Huang Rongqing's own journey of the heart.
