Changge City, April 24 - Zhongpin Inc., a leading meat and food processing company in the People's Republic of China, today announced that it will begin production of fruits and vegetables at its new facility in Henan Province on April 25, 2009.
The new processing facility is located in Changge City, Henan Province with a total production capacity of 30,000 metric tons. With the opening of the new facility, Zhongpin's existing production capacity of 12,600 metric tons for fruits and vegetables in Changge City will be relocated to this newly built processing facility and the old fruits and vegetables facility will be closed down. Due to the production seasonality and characteristics of fruits and vegetables, there is a high demand for freshness of produce in the market. The Company regularly requests quality processors of fruits and vegetables at the local producing areas to process a certain amount of fruits and vegetables. Upon successful commencement of production at the new facility, the total production capacity of fruits and vegetables will increase by 138% from 12,600 metric tons to 30,000 metric tons.
"We are pleased to report that we will commence operations at our new fruit and vegetable facility. While our pork and pork products business segment remains our primary growth driver, our R&D centre continues to research and develop prepared food products combining meat and vegetables as part of our efforts to optimally restructure our product mix," said by Mr. Xianfu Zhu, CEO of Zhongpin. "We are very confident in our ability to ramp up capacity utilization at the plant to quickly reach our target levels. A central location for our total fruit and vegetable production capacity offers us additional advantages including economies of scale, efficient distribution logistics, and lower fixed costs."