Peking University female PhD raises wild pheasants to start a business, monthly sales exceed 10 million after 3 years

After studying hard for 23 years and earning a medical doctorate from Peking University, Yu Chun returned to her hometown of Yuexi to start a business despite her parents' opposition. Because of her medical background, she focused on the wild pheasant project. Yu Chun said what she wants to do is very simple: provide food for the healthy growth of the next generation. "I am not a product producer, I am just a transporter of ecology." Starting from zero, to current monthly sales of 10 million, how did she do it?

Wearing a white coat doing product research in a laboratory, working a 9-to-5 schedule every day, a civil servant position with an annual salary of more than 100,000 yuan - to Yu Chun, a Peking University PhD, this seemed like a fitting match, and it once made her parents extremely proud. However, in 2013 one entrepreneurial decision by Yu Chun deeply influenced the trajectory of her later life.

Returning from Guangdong to her hometown of Yuexi, Anhui, she wanted to start a business deep in the Dabie Mountains, where the per capita monthly income is 3,000 yuan. Strong opposition and blame from her parents were unavoidable, and the entrepreneurial path was full of twists and turns and repeated setbacks. The products she sold also shifted from the initial fresh wild pheasant eggs to health-preserving supplements, but after more than two years of preparation and more than a year of development, Yu Chun still carved out a place for herself.

Starting from zero, to current monthly sales of 10 million, how did she do it?

Becoming an ecological transporter for her child

Recalling the situation right after she first resigned, Yu Chun said the biggest resistance in the early stage of entrepreneurship came from her parents' opposition. In that remote mountain valley, producing even one or two PhDs was extremely difficult. She resigned from her civil servant job at the Guangdong Health Department and returned home to start a business, which in her parents' eyes was incomprehensible. Fortunately, during this period she had her husband's understanding. Her husband was relatively open-minded; he resigned before she did, and when his wife resigned to start a business, he was also quite supportive.

Yu Chun, who has deep feelings for her hometown, chose her old home of Yuexi as the business location. For her, this could be called a second venture. "I already had one successful venture during my student days. While I was a graduate student, I had already successfully started a training company."

Only when the business gradually improved did Yu Chun's parents begin to slowly set their minds at ease and change their views on her entrepreneurship. This Father's Day, Yu Chun specially gave the wild pheasant eggs she sells to her father, and this time her father also silently accepted the gift and no longer blamed her.

Fresh food e-commerce was once regarded by the e-commerce world as the last blue ocean of e-commerce, but it was also widely recognized as a tough nut to crack. Why did Yu Chun choose products like wild eggs right from the start of her business?

"I am a farmer's child. I studied hard for 23 years. When I received my medical doctorate from Peking University, my blood was boiling. I thought I could finally change the world and cure the difficult and complicated diseases that afflict people." But when she saw one incident after another involving melamine, Sudan red, and gutter oil, she felt a chill like ice and snow. "It happened that at this time I became a mother. The arrival of this little sprite made me both joyful and worried. The food on our dining table three times a day shocked me. In what kind of environment is our next generation growing up?"

Yu Chun said what she wants to do is very simple: provide food for the healthy growth of the next generation. "I am not a product producer, I am just a transporter of ecology."

One day, she returned to her hometown, and her mother, as always, made her five grains and miscellaneous cereals and went up the mountain to collect wild pheasant eggs. Perhaps because she had lived in the city for too long, eating the food of her childhood tasted especially delicious to her, and because of this she began to pay attention to the purely natural ecological foods of her hometown.

Because of her medical background, she focused on the wild pheasant project. Wild pheasants are active, eat small meals more often, and eat only five grains, miscellaneous cereals, wild vegetables, and insects. More uniquely, because wild pheasants' lymphocytes and phagocytes are more developed than those of ordinary chicken breeds, their disease resistance is extremely strong. They almost never get sick, and there is even less need to inject antibiotics. The wild pheasant eggs from her hometown are also very different from the eggs she usually ate: smaller in size, brightly colored, and after boiling, excellent in taste, tender and delicious. Out of curiosity, she took several wild pheasant eggs back to a laboratory in Beijing for testing and discovered the special healthy nutritional value of the components of wild pheasant eggs.

After that, she and her team began conducting surveys and screening among hundreds of farming households in the hinterland of the Dabie Mountains, selecting qualified farming households to become her partners. According to reports, they traveled across the mountain ranges stretching for hundreds of li throughout the Dabie Mountains, found the first-generation pure natural wild pheasant breed, added advanced scientific free-range training, and shaped the natural environment for the original growth of wild pheasants, achieving six nos: no pathogens, no family disease history, no drug residues, no antibiotics, no hormones, no heavy metals, letting science and nature collide to produce an ecological combination.

Although it was still the early stage of the product, word of our team's wild pheasant egg project spread quickly, and everyone called them the "PhD Moms" team. As the project initiator, Yu Chun joked that people in the business all called her "Egg" Sister. Gradually, many pregnant women and mothers began to inquire about their products, and they also gradually became somewhat well known in mother circles.