Introduction

In 1999 Berry Ltd of the UK and Flying Dragon Ltd of Qingdao, China incorporated a joint venture in China's "market garden" province - Shandong. The name of this joint venture is Dragon's Garden. The founders are both trading companies with much experience sourcing raw materials for the food industry. 

David Berry of Berry Ltd is the Chairman of Dragon's Garden. David is a New Zealander now domiciled in the UK, and has a wealth of experience in the berryfruit industry.

Wang Jin (Kirby Wang) of Flying Dragon is the Managing Director of Dragon's Garden. Kirby's commercial background is in international trade and he formerly worked for a leading state-owned trading company.

Dragon's Garden's offices are in Qingdao. Qingdao has excellent communications with a busy seaport and recently opened international airport. Qingdao is a vibrant city that looks forward to hosting the sailing events of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Founding Principles

David and Kirby began working together in the late 1990s, predominantly on strawberry exports from Shandong. At that time the Chinese strawberry industry was just coming to the attention of world buyers, but the varieties grown in China were of limited appeal to the processing industry. The founding vision for Dragon's Garden was to introduce new varieties of soft fruits to Shandong province. From the outset it was the intenion that a major part of the production capacity would be organic.

Building Blocks

Dragon's Garden's first property was at Hong Dao (red island) a peninsula jutting into Qingdao Bay. This site was perfect to get the experimentation underway, and still acts as Dragon's Garden's nursery. A further farm at Hetao was soon also acquired.

It was quickly realised that being able to offer a complete service - from growing to final packing - would be a great strength, and therefore a processing facility was sought as a focal point around which to expand the planting programme. In the last part of 2002 a lease was taken out on a disused factory at Yifengdian village near Jimo City, about 1 hour from Qingdao. In 2003 after extensive refurbishment the packing of a range of soft fruits and tree fruits began at the Yifengdian factory.

Whilst the factory was being refurbished moves were also being made to expand the growing base. Dragon's Garden was able to take control of two further farms, and immediately set them on the path to organic certification. In 2005 one of these farms completed it's conversion period and is now fully organic, the other is still in conversion and will be fully organic from 2007.

      

Strawberry beds at Hongdao Nursery                   Dragon's Garden Factory at Yifengdian

A Success Story

At Dragon's Garden we are delighted to have achieved our aim of becoming a trusted supplier of organic and conventional products to customers on every continent. 

This success has in a large part been due to the hard work and dedication of Kirby and his management team. The Chinese have a term "Guanxi" which describes a personal or business relationship network, and it is this that has been instrumental to our success. It is testimony to all the hard work of Kirby and his staff that they have been able to draw together the goodwill of so many people who have contributed to the Dragon's Garden project.