Chapter 314 - 159: Drought (Part 2)

Chapter 314: Chapter 159: Drought (Part 2)

After the tasting event for the Vanilla Strawberry Powder concluded, the sales department didn’t immediately receive a large number of orders.

However, many high-end pastry shops and fine-dining restaurants expressed that if the Vanilla Strawberry Powder’s effect was comparable to that of Vanilla Pods, they would place orders with Hailufeng Company.

They did have one small request, though: they hoped Hailufeng Company could produce the Vanilla Strawberry Powder in smaller packages.

This was actually quite normal.

A 5-kilogram package of Vanilla Strawberry Powder was equivalent to 50 kilograms of vanilla paste. Even when aiming for a rich vanilla flavor, one kilogram of vanilla ice cream only required 1 gram of the powder. This meant that 5 kilograms of Vanilla Strawberry Powder could produce 5 tons of intensely vanilla-flavored ice cream.

High-end restaurants, fancy pastry shops, or bakeries would find it difficult to use up 5 kilograms of Vanilla Strawberry Powder in a short period.

Therefore, introducing smaller packaging was a must.

Upon receiving feedback from the sales department, Xie Guangxia, the manager of the strawberry processing plant, immediately started up the small-packaging production line.

This small-packaging production line could produce three different sizes: 50 grams, 200 grams, and 500 grams.

Moreover, the small-packaged Vanilla Strawberry Powder was available not only in powder form but also in granular form.

The granular Vanilla Strawberry Beans each weighed a standard 1 gram, a design intended for convenience of use.

By April, the production capacity of the Vanilla Strawberry greenhouses and the strawberry processing plant had been scheduled in an orderly fashion. On average, they could produce about 100 tons of Vanilla Strawberry Powder per month.

Even producing just 100 tons a month, at a wholesale price of 3.5 million per ton, would generate 350 million yuan in revenue each month.

This was the power of a luxury product combined with a monopoly.

A typical top-tier luxury industry is characterized by low costs, small scale, high revenue, and high profits.

Currently, Hailufeng Company held three such similar industries: White Truffle, eel fry, and Vanilla Strawberry Powder.

In contrast, products like feed, fish meat products, and fruit required large-scale operations to achieve high revenue, and even then, their gross margins were not high. ℯℯ𝘭.

「Meanwhile.」

Qin Xingzu, the manager of Hailufeng Company’s Network Department and the former head of the APP Development Office, was reviewing the internal testing status of the Hailufeng Specialty Store app.

Li Yu, the head of the APP Testing Office, took a sip of vanilla lemon tea. "Manager, we’ve received feedback on 17 issues during the current internal testing phase, and the initial corrections have been completed."

"The scale of internal testing needs to be expanded further," Qin Xingzu ordered as he looked at the report.

Li Yu replied with a troubled expression, "Expand it further? But all the company employees have already downloaded it. Are we supposed to do a small-scale public beta test?"

However, Qin Xingzu didn’t see this as a problem. "Have the HR department help out. Mobilize the employees to recommend our app to their relatives."

"Oh, like that? That should work," Li Yu said, agreeing that it was a good idea.

The number of employees at Hailufeng Company had now swelled to an entirely new level.

The dozen or so departments at headquarters currently had nearly five hundred people (including management trainees), and with over one hundred intern clerks, the total was 674 people.

The major business divisions: Aquaculture Division, 488 people; Planting Division, 994 people; Feed Division, 275 people; Brick-and-Mortar Division, 312 people; E-commerce Division, 124 people; Technology Division, 187 people.

Branches: Qiongzhou Branch, 249 people; Gannan Branch, 3,281 people; Monan Branch, 755 people.

Wholly-owned subsidiary: Hero Dairy, 857 people.

Joint ventures: Hailufeng Real Estate, 177 people; New Le Kang Pharmaceutical Company, 206 people; United Mining Company, 143 people.

The total number of employees in the entire Hailufeng System was 8,722.

For payroll alone, Hailufeng Company’s monthly expenses exceeded one hundred million yuan.

The Gannan Branch’s massive employee count was mainly due to the large number of farm workers. For the over 200,000-mu camellia oil plantation, along with its supporting industries like alfalfa cultivation and forage processing, a workforce of over three thousand was just barely enough to maintain normal operations—and that was with the assistance of extensive machinery.

Sometimes, when faced with tasks that needed to be rushed in a short period, they still had to temporarily hire local farmers for short-term labor.

This was the unfortunate reality of arbor-type agriculture.

Therefore, Qin Xingzu’s plan to have the HR department help by recommending the company’s app among employees’ relatives was completely feasible.

The friends and family of over eight thousand employees would add up to tens of thousands of people. Having so many people participate in the internal test would help discover as many system bugs in the app as possible, providing a reference for future corrections and optimizations. Furthermore, the user experience was also very important.

The previously shelved iOS version had also been developed, mainly because the Network Department was now fully staffed.

As for Hailufeng Company’s specialty store app, it was modeled after the shopping software Pinduoduo.

The main selling point was its simplicity and clarity. It took up very little system memory, even less than Pinduoduo.

This was also very normal.

The Hailufeng Specialty Store app only sold Hailufeng Company’s own products. Currently, the company’s offerings included eel fry, White Truffle, Morchella, Egyptian Catfish meat products, eel products, Tomato, Ginseng Fruit, strawberry, feed, fish oil, and honey, plus various ready-to-cook meals.

Coming soon were pineapples, mangoes, lychees, longans, and jackfruit produced by the Qiongzhou Branch.

From the Gannan Branch, there would be camellia seed oil, camellia seed cakes, and various extracts, as well as Purple Alfalfa Hay and other forage grasses.

Hero Dairy would produce large bags of milk powder, cream, whey protein powder, butter, yogurt, pure milk, culled dairy cow beef, and composted cow manure soil.