In this Internet era, everything can be sold online. A Taiwanese startup, Huayuan Biotech, cooperated with 22 egg farmers to launch the Taiwanese egg platform (好華雞Health Egg). It hopes to save more profits for the egg farmers by cutting off the middleman and let the egg farmers focus on product qualities. At the same time, taking account of consumers’ health concern to create a good cycle of technology.
Huayuan Biotech has not established for too long, but it has achieved little success in this short year, planning for IPO in 2019. In January of this year, they launched the “Good Huaji Proxy Mother” model, which means that consumers will receive a certain number of eggs with free delivery in the next eight months just by adopting a chicken. (Adopting a chicken costs around €33 and the average of an egg costs €0.13.) Huayuan makes consumers more aware of the TAP label (traceable agricultural products) of each egg. And this model can also guarantee the output of the egg farmers. Besides individual households, Huayuan has also cooperated with chained breakfast restaurants and retail stores like Carrefour. The current egg production has increased from 15,000 to 500,000 per day and the subscriber of the “Good Huaji Proxy Mother” has risen from 30 thousand to 60 thousand.
Now, Huayuan has come up with a O2O (online to offline) platform business model, launching a vertical e-commerce platform to sell eggs for egg farmers, who are not familiar with the field of logistic and marketing. The only requirement of the suppliers is that the eggs must be tested officially. Through this platform, egg farmers can earn more profit than the traditional channel. The founder of Huayuan, Huang Yiyuan, also indicated the difficulties to persuade the egg farmers into cooperation and with the size of the platform, he does not expect to make profit in the coming three years, but he is optimistic in the long-term.
In addition, there is another project within Huayuan that has already entered the testing stage, a real version of Happy Farm. They have designed a game called FUNGG that allows consumers to raise their own virtual chickens, and after 120 days, consumers will get a real chicken. At present, it seems that Huayuan’s creativity has found a different way through the unchanged traditional market, but after all, the starting time is not long enough. There may still be invisible potential challenges as time goes by and whether consumers are willing to change their purchasing habits is still unknown.
In my opinion, I really like the combination between information technology and agricultural. Thanks to it, people can now again have interactions with agricultural industry, despite living far away from farms. Moreover, egg industry is a really good entrance among agricultural products since protein is one of the most important nutrition people must obtain and most people eat eggs everyday. Nowadays, people tend to pay more attention on the sources of the food they obtain and are also leading a healthier lifestyle. Such company like Huayuan not only satisfies the consumer demand but also ensures the profit of the suppliers. With the advanced of information technology, cutting off the middleman will become a trend. Although it might bring a challenge to traditional agricultural market, it shows more respect and appreciation to farmers. Besides egg industry, I am convinced that every agricultural products has the same potential. For instance, consumers can rent the land and farmers will grow vegetables in return or consumers can even adopt pigs or cows in the future.
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