As brands go, they don’t come much bigger in the supermarket sauce aisle than Lee Kum Kee. Senior writer Mary Anne Gill visited the Chinese factory to see where the sauces originally came from.
Waikato Business News senior writer Mary Anne Gill finds a display of Lee Kum Kee products at the company’s Xinhui factory marketed in New Zealand.
Two things strike you entering Lee Kum Kee’s Xinhui factory in southeast China.
The size for a start on 133ha of land – the equivalent of 180 football fields – with its own port, a man-made wetland park and a solar power system on the soy sauce plant roof.
Lee Kum Kee’s Xinhui factory over 1.33ha. Photo: Supplied.
The other is the smell of fermenting soy beans coming from the more than 3000 giant green silos on the property.
And it all started with an accident 136 years ago when Lee Kum Sheung – a restaurateur in Nanshui, in the Guangdong province – burned a pot of oyster soup.
He tasted it, loved it so much that he started making and selling it as oyster sauce.
The rest is history. Today Lee Kum Kee is a global giant worth more than $NZ25 billion producing a wide range of Chinese and Asian sauces – including the oyster sauce – and Chinese health care products under the Infinitus umbrella.
Earlier this year the company’s New Zealand agents stepped in to save Wellington’s long-running Lunar New Year Festival when the city council pulled its funding. The company has been in New Zealand for decades, confirming the vision “Where there are Chinese, there is Lee Kum Kee.”
Headquarters are in Hong Kong, but its largest factory is to the west, at the site of the family’s ancestral home in Jiangmen city, Guangdon Province.
Xinhui factory, opened in 1996, is where the secret sauce recipes are kept and where an Exhibition Centre chronicles the company’s humble beginnings.
Eddy Lee, the oldest of the fourth generation – he has three brothers and a sister – greets us at the entrance and shows us a model of the huge site.
Lee Kum Kee owner Eddy Lee on the tourist train travelling around the huge Lee Kum Kee factory in Xinhui. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
Two decades ago, when his father Lee Man Tat was still alive, he and his siblings conceived a plan which would effectively prevent any family discourse.
They formed a family council to manage investments and succession and set up a five-seat board – Lee Man Tat and his four sons – to run the business.
The goal was to prevent a situation which threatened the company’s viability in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Family in-fighting and court action damaged familial ties in the third generation.
A plaque commemorates the unveiling of the Statue of Lee Kum Kee Family Council’s founding members. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
A statue unveiled in 2014, carved out of white marble and completed by Chinese sculptors Liu Hong-li and Liu Qiang – taken from a 2002 photo showing the council’s founding members – dominates the foyer. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
Among the family council rules are that only bloodline can own shares, the group cannot hire in-laws, and the younger generation must work outside the family business before returning.
While sauces are still the company’s mainstay – along with its health care products – it is also involved in real estate. The company bought the “Walkie Talkie” tower in London for $NZ2.8 billion in 2017. Its philanthropic arm gifted more than $NZ34 million to fund the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard University and donated a 1.29km bridge near the Xinhui factory over the Nantan Sea.
We walk through the oyster shell covered entrance of the Exhibition Centre into the 1880s with a display depicting Sheung accidentally discovering oyster sauce, the family’s move to Macau after a fire in Nanshui destroyed the workshop and the subsequent move to Hong Kong.
The accidental discovery of oyster sauce. Photo: Mary Anne Gill
The display includes old tools used to harvest and cook oysters, delivery bicycles, storage boxes and the company’s progress through its brands. There is even a depiction of “Sauce in Space” – Lee Kum Kee sauces fed astronauts on the Shenzhou missions.
Our next stop on the trackless tour train is the wetland park which purifies the plant’s treated wastewater through a wetland ecosystem comprising specific plants, algae, fish, prawns and shellfish. It covers 16,000 square metres and can treat 4000 cubic metres of wastewater a day. The treated water is then clean enough to be reused or discharged into the adjacent Tan Jiang River.
The technology is mind boggling in its simplicity as is the visitor experience of a scenic park, a koi fish pond, bird watching terrace and fitness facilities.
Our guide explains the water cleansing process. Photo: Mary Anne Gill
The man made wetland park at Lee Kum Kee’s Xinhui factory. Photo: Supplied.
The plant itself is where the humble non genetically modified soybean starts its journey. There are 18 steps to the fully automated process starting with screening, washing, soaking, cooking, blending, koji making, brine blending, propagation, fermentation (that smell again), pressing, filtration and finally packaging.
Another visitor notes the way our guide talks about soy sauces as though they are vintages of wine. The company knows its markets well and uses bottles of varying shapes, sizes and weights depending on the country.
The soy sauce production process. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
Infinitus, a Lee Kum Kee Group subsidiary and a direct-selling company which outsells Amway in several countries, has one of its two factories in Xinhui.
It is here where the company produces myriad health and skin care products based on traditional Chinese medicine concepts.
The venture is a highly lucrative one for the Lee Kum Kee Group which ploughs money back into research and development.
Infinitus products produced at the Xinui factory. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
Inside the fully automated Lee Kum Kee Xinhui factory. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
We wrap up our trip to Xinhui the next day with a visit to the nearby China Qiaodu Museum of Overseas Chinese, funded by overseas Chinese, including the Lee family.
The museum, opened in 2023, honours the companies from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan that returned to Jianmen to invest in businesses.
One of the displays at the China Qiaodu Museum of Overseas Chinese in Jianmen. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
It houses more than 40,000 pieces of cultural relics and highlights the role Chinese played globally, even here in New Zealand. Chinese first arrived in 1842 and more arrived in the 1860s – most from Guangdong in south China – during the gold rush. The museum notes the discrimination Chinese faced in New Zealand with the introduction of a head tax in 1881 which was only abolished in 1944 and resulted in 2002 with a formal apology from the New Zealand government.
New Zealand was not the only country to discriminate against China, as the rest of the exhibition shows.
As we leave, a large group of Chinese schoolchildren gather in the foyer. Eddy Lee, whose two companies Lee Kum Kee and Infinitus feature in the top 10 Chinese funded enterprises in the Jiangmen exhibition, modestly watches on. None of them would have any idea who he is, and that’s the way he likes it.
- Mary Anne Gill was on a self-funded trip to China but was a guest of Lee Kum Kee at the company’s Xinhui base.
Lee Kum Kee owner Eddy Lee walks across the foyer of the China Qiaodu Museum of Overseas Chinese in Jianmen unobserved by a large group of school children. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
Lee Kum Kee owner Eddy Lee looks at an exhibit in the China Qiaodu Museum of Overseas Chinese in Jianmen which puts his family in the top 10 of returning businesspeople who have contributed to the province. Photo: Mary Anne Gill.
