Kawa Food: Meat Marketing Master

The PCfarm Market in Ban­qiao, New Taipei City, bills itself as a place to buy “natural, high-quality, organic and healthy food.” All of its products have detailed descriptions of provenance supplied by producers and certifications of safety. The market has been steadily been building its reputation since it was established more than four years ago, and it now functions as an all-star market for A-list meat producers.

Kawa has set up a retail outlet—“Bastion of Fresh­ness”—at PCfarm Market, where it has split the space into three: one part for refrigerated foods, one for frozen foods and one for fresh cuts. The latter is a lot like a traditional-style meat market. Kawa’s butchers provide specific cuts, amounts and shapes of meat in accordance with the wishes of its customers. What’s different is that here there is safety certification, refrigeration, and clean counters, and consumers can discuss the meat products with Kawa’s knowledgeable workers.

With the right ingredients, simply prepared food tastes great. Kawa’s “Energy Pork” has a sweet scent after it is cooked, and its “Black-Diamond Chicken” is succulent and firm, suitable for stewing or boiling.

Kawa general manager Arnold Wang explains that the brand’s name comes from the Taiwanese “kawa,” meaning “even more nimble.” “You often hear elders talk about how you’ve got

to be kawa in how you do things and treat people,” he explains. “If your daily food can be kawa too, so that you’re happier and more carefree, wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

Five years ago Wang, then 40, left his position as a top executive and

board member at Jingo Records, announcing that he wanted to make people’s lives more kawa. He decided to go into animal husbandry, a field where he had family connections. Wang’s uncle Huang Guo­zheng had been involved in the poultry business in Yun­lin for many decades, successfully raising free-range silkie chickens (the highly prized “black-boned chicken” in Chinese herbal recipes). Wang has deeply embedded memories from childhood of the delicious flavor of the chickens that the family raised: the sweet scent of fragrant chicken meat enveloping his nostrils. The flesh was so tender and tasty that there was no need to add any seasoning. Even the skin was crispy and sweet, and barely oily at all.

“My mother taught me that with naturally high-quality ingredients, you could create memorable and moving food with the simplest of cooking techniques.” Going back to nature was the inspiration for Wang to create his business.

Huang Guo­zheng’s free-range chickens became Wang’s first branded product and trial-by-fire experience with marketing. Huang’s poultry farm was a little under one hectare, and he had all along embraced low-density methods of raising chickens. For his Black-Diamond Poultry (which currently occupies only part of his farm), he specially created a richly nutritious feed for his chickens and insisted that they be raised for five months, so that they would naturally mature.

Haung Guozheng’s expertise in raising free-range chickens and silkies is the source of some delicious memories for Arnold Wang. Today the uncle and nephew have become business partners.

Yet because Kawa was short on experience, it was at first only able to market whole frozen chickens, which conflicted with Taiwanese consumers’ preference for meat that is freshly slaughtered. And Taiwanese consumers would rather buy refrigerated meat than frozen meat. The gourmet supermarket Jasons Market Place offered them some friendly advice: “Other brands have tried to market frozen meat before with no success. Better to give up on it early, rather than later.”

Unyielding, Wang personally went to the supermarket to request that they allow him to set up a stand with a stove for a period of time. He demonstrated how to cook bai­zhan boiled chicken. Those who tried it remarkably brought sales to over NT$10,000 on the very first day, and with that, he won over the seven branches of Jasons in Taiwan.

Kawa’s salespersons often hold cooking demonstrations or explanations at various points of sale. After being established for a year, it was selling nearly 100 products that were either produced or processed by the company at nearly 200 grocery stores specializing in organic or gourmet food. To make things convenient for small families, the company offers frozen packages of single chicken portions, drumsticks, deboned meat, and so forth. Prepared packages of herbal-stewed chicken and stuffed dumplings have also been met with enthusiasm.

A turning point for Kawa came when it began working with Tai­quan Farm in Yun­lin to push the brand “Energy Pork.”

With the right ingredients, simply prepared food tastes great. Kawa’s “Energy Pork” has a sweet scent after it is cooked, and its “Black-Diamond Chicken” is succulent and firm, suitable for stewing or boiling.

In Yun­lin’s Mai­liao, the Tai­quan Farm has over 10,000 pigs. The operation includes a feed factory, a pig farm and a slaughterhouse. Five years ago owner Lin Shu­lin asked his nephew Xu Jia­lun, who had experience working for organic groceries, to help lead an effort to create a Tai­quan brand so they could sidestep the middlemen and achieve higher profit margins.

With no experience in marketing meat, Xu took the initiative to seek out Wang. After negotiations, Tai­quan became a shareholder in Kawa, and Kawa became something like a brand field marshal, involved in the entire production process.

To bolster its brands, Tai­quan has spent more than NT$10 million to create drug-free feed supply channels, including dedicated vehicles. Starting by selecting the strongest piglets, it forsakes the use of drugs throughout the entire rearing process, relying instead on nutritious feed to raise resistance to disease. It insists on allowing the pigs to naturally mature over the course of seven months, and even lets them enjoy classical music and water massages.

Yet early on, there was little demand for these fastidiously raised high-quality pigs other than for the two jowl cuts used in Ma­tsu­zaka pork. Kawa and Tai­quan had to sell the rest cheaply on the general market. It wasn’t until last year that they had a change in fortunes and were able to sell out their 100 pigs at full price each month.

With the concern for meat safety that arose last year, Wang was successfully able to turn a crisis into an opportunity. High-quality meat finally captured consumers’ attention, and the company has started breaking even this year.