Letter from Taizhou Municipal Bureau of Commerce on Response to Proposal No. 2024233 of the Third Session of the Sixth Municipal Political Consultative Conference

To Members Zhang Xiang and Zheng Jianjun:

We acknowledge receipt of your proposal Regarding Accelerating the Upgrade and Promoting High-Quality Development of Our City's Catering Industry (Proposal No. 2024233) submitted at the Third Session of the Sixth Taizhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). After deliberation, our response is as follows:

The catering industry is closely linked to the daily lives of the people and is a crucial sector for stimulating consumption, benefiting people's livelihoods, and stabilizing employment. Excelling in and strengthening the catering industry is of great significance for implementing the municipal Party committee and government's strategic decision to apply for the designation of "World City of Gastronomy," and for further expanding consumption to promote high-quality development. Currently, the municipal government has issued and implemented the Implementation Opinions on Further Accelerating the High-Quality Development of the 'Taizhou Cuisine' Food Industry. Guided by the goal of becoming a World City of Gastronomy, identified by the Taizhou culinary system, and driven by the "Six Major Projects," we will promote the high-quality development of the Taizhou cuisine food industry. By 2025, we aim to cultivate a group of renowned Taizhou cuisine enterprises, chefs, dishes, and restaurants; establish over 10 Taizhou cuisine food clusters; build a Taizhou cuisine chef training system led by the Xin Rong Ji Academy; and form the Taizhou cuisine brand characterized by fusion and innovation.

I. Accelerating the Application for World City of Gastronomy Designation

The World City of Gastronomy designation is the top honor for global culinary cities. The application process is the "leading project" for developing Taizhou's food industry and the most prominent platform for promoting "Taizhou Cuisine." Since the initiation of the application, relevant departments such as commerce and culture & tourism have done substantial work, laying the foundation for the application. Next, our city will accelerate substantive work, focusing on thoroughly studying the rules, standards, and procedures for applying to become a "World City of Gastronomy." With the goal of "laying the foundation in 3 years and achieving results in 5 years," we will further clarify the timeline, striving to enter the formal application process in 2025. Throughout the application process, we will maintain communication and liaison with the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Education, the provincial Party committee and government, as well as relevant national professional associations. We will conduct regular visits and briefings and designate liaisons responsible for contacting and connecting with UNESCO to establish close relations. We will strengthen culinary exchanges with the outside world, riding the "fast train" of cultural outreach. We will actively conduct "going global" and "inviting in" international culinary exchange activities, organize culinary exchange exhibitions and performances, enhance the international reputation of "Taizhou Cuisine," and continuously promote Taizhou cuisine culture.

II. Expanding the Culinary Talent Team

In the catering industry, flavor is the prerequisite, and talent cultivation is the foundation. Chefs, as the creators of cuisine, are the soul of culinary inheritance, promotion, and the development of the food industry. Behind the expansion of the food industry in every culinary city, there is a large contingent of culinary talents creating and exporting cuisine. We will learn from the experience of advanced regions like Yangzhou in cultivating culinary talents. Leveraging the approval of the Wenzhou-Taizhou region as a pilot for building a national vocational education highland, we will improve the vocational education ecosystem for the catering industry. Centered on chefs, we will strengthen the entire talent chain system including catering management and services, introduce a full-chain education system from secondary vocational to undergraduate levels, and quickly build a large talent force matching the development of the Taizhou cuisine food industry. A key focus will be successfully running the Xin Rong Ji Academy, building the Taizhou Chef Training and Education Center, Taizhou Cuisine Research and Development Center, Taizhou Catering Culture Research and Communication Center, and Taizhou Culinary Talent Training Base, striving to create a "Whampoa Military Academy" that produces masters of "Taizhou Cuisine."

III. Fostering Leading Industrial Clusters

For the food industry to develop, food enterprises must play the leading role, with key enterprises providing guidance. Currently, the number and scale of leading catering enterprises in our city still need improvement. In 2023, the operating revenue of above-scale catering enterprises in the city was only 4.063 billion yuan. Guided by the food enterprise cultivation project, we will focus on supporting leading "Taizhou Cuisine" enterprises to improve quality, polish their brands, expand beyond Taizhou, and scale up. We will fully revitalize "time-honored" catering enterprises, focusing on excavating "Taizhou Cuisine · Time-honored" catering brands. We will promote these "time-honored" enterprises to establish new operational mechanisms, innovate marketing methods, and increase market share in accordance with modern enterprise management requirements. Meanwhile, Taizhou cuisine needs not only more establishments like Xin Rong Ji but also a proliferation of snacks and dishes symbolized by "chewy" textures to form a scale effect. Led by key enterprises, we will promote popular catering, vigorously develop the snack economy, compile a Taizhou snack "food map," and advance the standardized management and development of the snack industry. Focusing on "Famous Taizhou Dishes," we will strengthen R&D of prepared dish products, strengthen the three industrial chains of aquatic products, rice/vegetables, and meat/poultry, opening up new growth space for Taizhou cuisine.

IV. Ensuring Food Industry Quality Control

The essence of Taizhou cuisine's reputation for freshness lies in excellent, fresh ingredients. We will treat ingredient source quality control as a foundational project for expanding the food industry. While ensuring ingredient safety, we will focus on quality improvement and brand building, striving to create premium ingredient supply bases for "Taizhou Cuisine." On one hand, we will strengthen standardized control and closed-loop supervision of ingredients. We will promote public brands like "Tai Jiu Xian" and entities with geographical indications for agricultural products to obtain green food certification. We will advance the data integration of the "Tai Nong Lian," "Tai Yu Lian," and "Zhe Shi Lian" platforms to achieve closed-loop management of food quality and safety traceability, providing sufficient, high-quality, and safe ingredient guarantees for the development of the Taizhou cuisine food industry. On the other hand, we will enhance the quality supply of agricultural and aquatic products, explore building a quality supply system for agricultural and aquatic products, establish a Taizhou high-quality agricultural and aquatic product supply database, clarify the best harvest/fishing periods and consumption shelf life for various ingredients (for example, Xin Rong Ji adheres to the philosophy of "Seeking the True in Food, Then Achieving Beauty," offering dishes based on high-quality seasonal ingredients, maximizing the freshness of "Taizhou Cuisine"). We will identify optimal production regions, create the freshest, fastest, and most comprehensive agricultural and aquatic product supply chain, striving for every "Taizhou Cuisine" dish to use the freshest and highest-quality ingredients.

V. Polishing the Taizhou Culinary IP

Utilizing Tencent Group's project to build the "Taizhou City Culinary IP," the "Taizhou Cuisine" digital map is now online and has been updated to version 2.0. The included restaurant list has expanded to over 400, with cumulative online exposure reaching 9.9572 million person-times. Simultaneously, Taizhou city culinary-themed short films—The Little-Known Taizhou and May Day: Go to a Place with Freshness—have been released, achieving cumulative exposure of 98.75 million person-times, continuously attracting tourists to Taizhou to taste its cuisine. In collaboration with new media "amplifiers" like Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, and local Wangchao, we will quickly activate the popularity and traffic of "Taizhou Cuisine" by inviting million-follower internet celebrities for live stream restaurant visits, having expert teams film documentaries, and collaborating with popular brands, helping "Taizhou Cuisine" break further into the mainstream. We will regularly carry out "Taizhou Cuisine" series food festival activities, organize the "Delicious Zhejiang" Catering Joy Season activities, continuously promote food festival brands like the Taizhou Donghai Cultural Tourism Festival, Sanmen Green Crab Festival, Huangyan Citrus Festival, and Xianju Bayberry Festival, building momentum for "Taizhou Cuisine." We will organize activities such as "Taizhou Cuisine Hong Kong-Macau Tour," "Taizhou Cuisine Fragrance Floats in Beijing," "Savor Taizhou · Taizhou Cuisine" Shanghai promotion, and successfully host the "China Folk Chef Competition," further enhancing the status and fame of "Taizhou Cuisine" in the national catering industry.

VI. Increasing Policy Support

First, implement the "Diamond and Star Pursuit" action to polish the "Taizhou Cuisine" golden signboard. Increase policy reward support, organize benchmarking studies, and fully promote leading catering enterprises to improve cooking standards, restaurant environment and service, and inheritance and innovation capabilities. Strive to attain national diamond-rated restaurants, Michelin stars, or Black Pearl recognitions. Aim to achieve, by 2025, over 5 newly certified national four-diamond or five-diamond restaurants, and over 2 new Michelin-starred or Black Pearl restaurant enterprises, enhancing the brand appeal of "Taizhou Cuisine" in the high-end catering and fine dining sectors. Second, implement the "Time-honored Brand Revitalization" action to unleash the consumption vitality of characteristic catering. Deeply explore and cultivate Taizhou's "time-honored" catering and intangible cultural heritage food resources. Promote the inheritance, protection, and innovative development of time-honored catering brands. Strive to cultivate over 2 "China Time-honored Brand" or "Zhejiang Time-honored Brand" catering enterprises within three years, and designate over 10 "Taizhou Time-honored Brand" entities in catering and snack categories. Third, effectively issue consumption vouchers. In accordance with the 2024 Consumption Voucher Distribution Work Plan, no less than 20% of the city's 300 million yuan consumption vouchers will be allocated to the accommodation and catering industry. We will innovate the consumption voucher distribution model, focusing on linked distribution models like "automobile + catering" and "tourism + catering," to further increase support for accommodation and catering consumption.

VII. Strengthening Culinary Culture Promotion

Food is no longer just a list of dishes or a single menu item; what tourists taste is not only the flavor of the ingredients themselves but also contains the rich local customs and city quality. While vigorously developing "Taizhou Cuisine," we will work on the "food +"article, further leveraging the "multiplier effect" and "expansion effect" under the guidance of culinary culture. We will promote the deep integration of the "food + culture & tourism" industries, making "Taizhou on the Tip of the Tongue" a core competitiveness for cultural and tourism integration. The focus will be on centering on the "Two Routes" (Zhejiang · Taizhou No. 1 Coastal Road, the Zhejiang East Tang Poetry Road) and guided by the "Hundred Counties, Thousand Bowls · Freshness in Taizhou" brand project, linking Taizhou's beautiful scenery, culture, and cuisine. We will plan a series of Taizhou characteristic food tourism routes and experiential, immersive food projects to enrich travel experiences, allowing Taizhou's overlapping creation of "good food + fun + beauty" in tourism to create greater value. Promote the coordinated development of "food + city." Led by the city quality improvement action, we will further optimize the layout planning of urban food life circles, improve city supporting facilities matching a City of Gastronomy, and build a high-quality city suitable for living and working. Promote the parallel advancement of "food + enriching the people." Led by the "No. 1 Reform Project" of optimizing the business environment, we will further deepen the facilitation reform of the whole process handling in the catering industry, making catering enterprises feel more convenient and comfortable and easier to join and better to operate.

We thank you for your concern and support for our city's catering industry work!

Translator：Jiayang Lin