A Little Story of Xanthan Gum
On December 12, 2014, Professor Zhao Dajian of the School of Life Sciences of Nankai University passed away due to illness. However, there were hardly any media reports, let alone journalists writing any articles with sensational words such as the father of Chinese xanthan gum. Today, China's xanthan gum industry, which accounts for the world's largest production, has not made any mourning articles.
You may never have heard of xanthan gum, but you and your children are likely to eat it often because it is ubiquitous in a wide range of foods such as ice cream, ketchup, jelly, yogurt, soy sauce, eight-treasure porridge, cheese, bread, and cakes. Xanthan gum is also widely used in industrial fields such as paints, fire extinguishers, toothpaste, cosmetics, ceramics, papermaking, printing and dyeing, and petroleum.
Throughout the 1980s, China's xanthan gum was almost entirely imported, and the price was about $15,000/ton, while the monthly income of a university lecturer in that year was only about $10-20.
Today, the price of xanthan gum has dropped to less than $1,500/ton. China's production is already the highest in the world. In 2015, the US Department of Commerce launched an anti-dumping investigation when it counterattacked the United States.
What exactly happened over the years? I'm going to start telling the story of the old Chinese scientist and the subsequent outbreak of the Chinese xanthan gum industry.
Introduction
Because food additives make us talk about tiger color, I will briefly introduce xanthan gum here first.
Xanthan Gum (also known as xanthan gum, Chinese raw gum, etc.) is a soluble biological fiber, that is, it comes from bioengineering and is fermented by specific strains of corn starch. Strictly speaking, this fermentation is no essential difference from brewing wine to make yogurt, and it is pure natural.
The FDA has approved it as a safe food additive for nearly 60 years. Even because of its safety, the FDA has approved xanthan gum as a pharmaceutical additive for thickening and shaping many medicines, such as cough syrup.
However, this article is not about washing the floor for biochemical products.
one
Xanthan gum has a very special property, that is, as long as you add a little bit to the water, it immediately becomes sticky. To exaggerate, juice with xanthan gum becomes jam, and milk with xanthan gum is like old yogurt.
In academic terms, it is called a thickener. At the same time, xanthan gum is also a highly effective stabilizer, emulsifier, and foam enhancer, the latter of which is a huge help in the softness of cakes and breads.
two
Due to the wide range of uses and market value of xanthan gum, Chinese scientists who have been suppressed for many years have begun to actively participate in related research work since the beginning of reform and opening up. Dozens of institutes such as Nankai University, Shandong University, Wuxi Institute of Light Industry, and Institute of Biology of Chinese Academy of Sciences have carried out related research from different paths. In 1979, Nankai University Department of Biology "Preliminary Report on the Study of Xanthomonas Fermentation to Produce Acid Polysaccharides" was a landmark article, marking the beginning of the isolation of xanthan gum strains in our country. Since then, the efforts of Professor Zhao Dajian of Nankai University and others for decades have laid a solid theoretical foundation for basic research on xanthan gum.
Biological gums can usually be divided into vegetable gums, animal gums, and microbial gums. Vegetable gums include guar gum, gum arabic, rubber, seaweed gum, etc., which need to be cultivated and collected; animal gums are more famous for gelatin, which was discredited due to leather shoes some time ago, and donkey skin Ejiao, which claims to cure all diseases. Our protagonist today, xanthan gum, is a microbial gum produced by bacterial fermentation. Microbial gums are less affected by regional environmental production and are a good target for the biochemical industry.
three
In 1986, the Shandong Food Fermentation Industry Research and Design Institute and Nankai University collaborated to achieve the first non-economical production in Yantai Microbial Polysaccharide Factory (Yantai MSG Factory), making an important breakthrough in the industrialization of xanthan gum. Nankai University and Jiangsu Jinhu MSG Factory also tried the production of food-grade xanthan gum. However, the immature fermentation process and post-extraction technology, the energy consumption is extremely high, and the cost of raw materials such as ethanol is alarming. It can only stay in the pilot stage. The high cost makes the product uncompetitive. These early attempts were not successful.
The progress of science and technology has always been obtained from continuous failure. Shandong Food Fermentation Industry Research and Design Institute was a small research institute with only a few dozen researchers at the time. After being honed, it became the source of technology for the explosion of Shandong xanthan gum industry. They later made important breakthroughs in industrialization such as itaconic acid.
Sun Liqiang, the former director of Yantai MSG Factory, also became the leader of Changyu Group for more than 20 years.
Four
In 1983, Professor Cheng Guisun, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (hereinafter referred to as Professor Cheng) who had just returned from Switzerland, carried out several microbial research projects at the same time, and xanthan gum was one of them. She did not know at the time how much xanthan gum would make her suffer in the future; nor did she know at the time that no one mentioned her name in the glorious xanthan gum industry in China today.
The strain of xanthan gum is scientifically called Xanthomonas rapeseed. But it is not one, but there are hundreds of mutated flora. In Europe and the United States, researchers make different targeted products by screening the glue production and glue characteristics of different strains, so as to obtain higher profits.
Professor Cheng noticed that the biggest problem in China's xanthan gum industry is that the ethanol consumption of the extracted gum from the fermentation broth is too large, and one ton of xanthan gum consumes one ton or even several tons of ethanol. Ethanol is alcohol, and the cost is very high. This consumption method makes it possible to produce it economically.
Professor Cheng took a different approach and started by guiding Xanthomonas to mutate, trying to find a variety that can extract gum without alcohol. After years of hard work, he finally found a strain that can settle the colloid by adjusting the pH and produce high yields at the same time. And hydrochloric acid is a super cheap thing, which makes mass production economical. In 1987, Professor Cheng and her assistant Liu Xiaoyang applied for Chinese patent CN 87106960.
Unfortunately, it was the 1980s. The industrialization of technology was an insurmountable mountain at that time: inefficient state-owned enterprises, complicated processes, few private enterprises, lack of money and few people, all kinds of equipment are outdated and incredibly old, and there is no such thing as venture capital (VC).
Five
Professor Cheng was born in a scholarly family. His father was a professor in the Vehicle Teaching and Research Group of Shanghai Jiaotong University and an expert in the United States before liberation. In the 1950s, Cheng was admitted to the Department of Biology of Fudan University, and the head of the department that year was Dr. Tan Jiazhen, who was born in the laboratory of Morgan, the father of modern genetics.
The biological world had an unforgettable history back then. In the 1950s, with the assistance of the Soviet Union, all universities in China made a large-scale Soviet-style department adjustment in 1952, and textbooks were also changed to Soviet-style. The Michelinism of Lysenko in the Soviet Union was very popular, and it did not recognize the existence of genes at all.
Just because Morgan was an American, the whole Chinese academic community set off a wave of criticism of Morgan's genetics for ideological reasons. At that time, only Fudan of Tan Jiazhen agreed with the theory of genetics and told his students the latest discovery of the epoch-making DNA of Watson and Crick in 1953. The sad result is that almost all other universities in molecular biology and genetics in China have been stagnant for 20 years.
In 1968, Professor Cheng's father, an early expert in China's railway industry, was persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution because he had "studied in the United States".
six
In the 1980s, there were more than 200 monosodium glutamate factories in China that fermented corn starch to extract sodium glutamate, which was very cheap. MSG back then was not like today, when restaurants were proud to be MSG-free. Due to the extremely poor variety of food at that time, MSG was the most important seasoning.
Because the production of xanthan gum is similar to that of monosodium glutamate, Professor Cheng and Liu Xiaoyang started a long journey from a poorly managed monosodium glutamate factory. Big companies with good profits can't count on it. After several years of hard work, xanthan gum technology has finally fallen through in several dilapidated factories in Xinhe, Shaanxi Baoji, and Jiangxi.
In those days, it took 20 hours to travel from Beijing to Shanghai by train, not to mention the hard work of trains and cars in these remote areas. The lack of technical personnel, poor accommodation conditions and poor diet in the small area made Professor Cheng and Liu Xiaoyang, who were in their 50s at the time, exhausted. Professor Cheng turned himself from a scientist to an engineer, teaching hand-in-hand from fermentation tank cleaning and bacteriostatic breeding to how to choose centrifuges and presses, and solved the problems one by one, and finally succeeded in the economical mass production of xanthan gum for the first time.
Due to the real breakthrough in the industry, Professor Cheng's project was selected into the National Torch Program in 1990, and Xanthan Gum from Xinhe, Hebei was listed as a national new product in 1992. In 1993, Professor Cheng won the National Invention Award, one of the highest national science and technology awards, and was awarded and received by the top national leaders and all the Standing Committee at the National Science and Technology Conference.
Seven
Until the mid-to-late 1990s, due to low cost factors, Hebei Xinhe Biochemical Factory and Jiangxi MSG Factory accounted for more than 70% of China's xanthan gum production share.
Today, Hebei Xinhe Biochemical Plant has been renamed Hebei Xinhe Biochemical Co., Ltd. This small county more than 100 kilometers away from Xingtai in remote Hebei Province is surprisingly one of the largest domestic industrial xanthan gum producers, with customers including China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec Group, Schlumberger, BASF and other multinational giants.
Eight
In the 2000s, with the import and advance of a large number of equipment, stainless steel tanks and pipes are more reliable, greatly reducing the loss of alcohol in the production of food-grade xanthan gum. At the same time, due to the innovation of laboratory technology, the level of vaccine screening and cultivation has also been greatly improved. This makes the mass production of food-grade xanthan gum in our country economical.
The aforementioned Shandong Food Fermentation Industry Research and Design Institute has become the technical source of Zibo Zhongxuan through more than ten years of persistent research and development and breakthroughs. The opening of branches and leaves by Shandong fermentation industry technicians, as well as the acquisition of equipment and resources from Yantai MSG Factory, are also the reasons why Fufeng Group came to the fore.
Fufeng Group was just a monosodium glutamate factory in Junan, a poor Yimeng Mountain District in Shandong Province. By continuously acquiring old equipment to expand production capacity, it was equivalent to merging many small monosodium glutamate factories at low cost and later became the king of monosodium glutamate. In 2003, just when all technical conditions were ripe, Fufeng decisively entered the xanthan gum industry and obtained a very competitive card position by decisively deploying resources in corn and coal areas.
Nine
There are currently three large-scale xanthan gum companies in China by headquarters in Shandong: Fufeng, Zhongxuan and Youkai; and two in Hebei: Meihua and Xinhe. It is actually unusual for the industry to be concentrated in North China, because private enterprises in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong are generally more developed in China. Excluding raw material reasons, here we can also implicitly see the industrial layout caused by the contributions of scientists.
Today, Chinese companies account for about 40% of the global market share, ranking first in the world. American companies hold the second place with about 35% of the share, mostly chemical giants: CP Kelco, ADM, Cargill, DuPont, etc. Others are mainly European companies. Due to the wide variety of American products, there is not much direct competition with Chinese products. In 2013, due to the complaint of CP Kelco, a veteran American xanthan gum manufacturer, the US Department of Commerce launched anti-dumping investigations against Chinese and Austrian manufacturers. The funny thing is that in 2016, it was finally ruled that CP Kelco's Shandong branch also had dumping against the United States. This shows that the price competitiveness of Shandong's fermentation industry is really not blown.
When Zhongxuan and Fufeng applied for xanthan gum-related patents, they both cited or were cited by Professor Cheng's patent. Professor Cheng's patent was written in too much detail and did not hide the technical details at all. The personal benefits Professor Cheng has obtained from xanthan gum over the years are less than 10,000 yuan.
The joys and sorrows caused by many great epochs are beyond words, but the ending is still happy. Maybe our society can stop respecting real estate and capital predators as idols in the near future, and truly take technology as the foundation of the country, and eventually compete with the European and American powers.
In a few days, it will be Professor Cheng's 80th birthday: I sincerely wish the elderly a happy birthday, health and longevity with this article!
