What are quick-drink vegetables? How do they relate to plant factories? A new food trend is here!
The "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022)" recommend a daily vegetable intake of 300-500g per person (with half being dark-colored vegetables) to reduce the risk of stroke, coronary heart disease, gastrointestinal cancers, and mortality from cardiovascular diseases. However, with the accelerating pace of life and changing dietary habits among Chinese residents, vegetable consumption is severely insufficient. This is particularly true for busy urban office workers (who often eat out or travel for business) and students burdened with heavy academic loads (relying on canteens), who often struggle to ensure adequate vegetable intake. This leads to significant nutritional deficiencies in vegetables, subsequently triggering various sub-health conditions such as obesity, weakened immunity, and gastrointestinal disorders.
Figure 1: Chinese Residents' Balanced Diet Pagoda (2022)
Dr. Liao Qiuhong of the Plant Factory Innovation Team at the Institute of Urban Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, is dedicated to this endeavor, pioneering a new category of quick-drink vegetables to address the issues of insufficient, incomplete, and poor-quality vegetable consumption among Chinese residents. In response to national policies and those of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences encouraging scientific and technical personnel to innovate and start businesses while employed, she established Caoyangji (Chengdu) Technology Co., Ltd., founded the "Xiao Shu Kuai Kuai" brand , and carried out innovative R&D, initial product creation, and scientific validation for quick-drink vegetables.
Quick-Drink Vegetables use modern scientific technology to change the physical form of vegetables, retaining over 95% of their nutrients and offering a shelf life of more than 2 years . They feature advantages such as storability, transport durability, portability, and ease of consumption , transforming vegetables that were traditionally consumed only during main meals into drinks that can be enjoyed anytime, anywhere. "Quick-Drink" embodies quick and enjoyable vegetable consumption, launching a new trend and new "food" fashion in vegetable eating.
Figure 2: Initial product for quick-drink vegetables
Ready-to-drink vegetable products will greatly promote the leapfrog development of related upstream and downstream industries. The demand for raw materials for ready-to-drink vegetables—characterized by cleanliness, safety, customized nutrition, and year-round production—will effectively drive the large-scale application of plant factories (including leafy vegetable factories, fruiting vegetable factories, etc.). Led by Researcher Yang Qichang, an academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences and chief of the Intelligent Horticultural Equipment Innovation Team, the team successfully achieved large-scale vegetable production using plant factory technology in the Gobi Desert and deserts of Xinjiang, rapidly expanding the scale of application. The established "Gobi Vegetable Warehouse" ensures an ample supply of high-quality raw vegetable materials. The developed ready-to-drink vegetable products feature long shelf life, compact size, and resistance to storage and transportation, effectively solving vegetable preservation and logistics challenges and significantly facilitating the entry of "Gobi Vegetable Warehouse" products based on plant factories into the consumer market. Meanwhile, the large-scale application of "Gobi Vegetable Warehouse" plant factories will also drive the rapid development of related industries such as horticultural lighting, intelligent environmental control, and integrated water and fertilizer management, thereby expanding a new industry chain.
Quick-Drink Vegetables is a brand-new healthy nutrition category, with the following outstanding advantages:
1. High-quality raw materials. The vegetable ingredients for quick drinks are sourced from advanced facility agricultural production systems such as plant factories. Hydroponic cultivation is used to avoid food safety issues like pesticide residues, heavy metal contamination, and soil microbial pollution. Nutritional customization is achieved by regulating environmental parameters such as light, temperature, water, air, and fertilizer during growth, ensuring green, safe, nutritious, and healthy products.
2. Comprehensive nutrient retention. Advanced drying technology preserves over 95% of the nutrients, as well as the color, aroma, and taste of the vegetable ingredients, allowing you to enjoy the natural flavor of the vegetables.
3. Supplement dietary nutrition. Based on the balanced diet concept proposed by the Chinese Nutrition Society, Kuaiyin Vegetable scientifically combines ingredients according to the nutritional needs of different groups, comprehensively supplementing vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber, phytochemicals, and other nutrients to meet daily vegetable nutrition requirements and easily achieve nutritional balance.
4. Convenient to consume. Fast-drink vegetables change the physical form of vegetables, offering diverse consumption methods and scenarios. Drinking vegetables as conveniently as drinking water is the best choice for daily vegetable intake for people who dine out, travel on business, or are picky eaters.
5. Long shelf life. Extreme drying and vacuum packaging extend the shelf life of vegetables to over 2 years, making them suitable as vegetable reserves for special periods and extreme conditions.
Founder of Kuaiyin Vegetable Category: Liao Qiuhong
Liao Qiuhong: Ph.D., core member of the Plant Factory Innovation Team at the Institute of Urban Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Graduated from the Faculty of Agriculture, Kyoto University, Japan in 2017, specializing in food nutrition testing and processing; joined the Institute of Urban Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 2019, focusing on innovative R&D of downstream products for plant factories; in 2023, pioneered a new category of ready-to-drink vegetables, providing a brand-new Solution for high-quality raw material output from production-side plant factories and addressing insufficient vegetable intake among consumers.