About Zhongyuan Food Laboratory

Zhongyuan Food Laboratory

Zhongyuan Food Laboratory, also rendered in English as the Food Laboratory of Zhongyuan and as the Central Plains Food Laboratory, is a Henan provincial laboratory in Luohe, the Central Plains food city. Planned by Henan Province in 2022 as part of its rebuilt provincial-laboratory system, it officially opened on 22 September 2022 and operates as a provincial research and innovation organisation for food science. It is directed by Academician Ren Fazheng of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The laboratory works through research bases at universities, innovation teams led by chief scientists, and cooperation agreements with food enterprises, and in September 2025 it became the joint operator, with Louis Dreyfus Company, of a 930-square-metre joint laboratory in Luohe.

Planning and opening in Luohe

Henan Province announced its intention to rebuild and reshape its provincial-laboratory system in early 2022. Reporting of the provincial science and technology work conference on 11 February 2022, carried from Henan Daily, said the province would plan a new batch of provincial laboratories, naming a Food Laboratory alongside Longmen Laboratory, a Zhongyuan key-metal laboratory and a modern immunisation laboratory, under the principle of approving and unveiling each laboratory when it was ready. The food laboratory took shape in Luohe, a city whose economy is strongly identified with food processing. It officially opened on 22 September 2022. Its early operation was described as rapid: within about four months it had appointed its senior research teams, completed major facilities and begun systematic research programmes, a pattern summarised in later strategic reporting as operating immediately upon establishment.

The scientists conference of early 2023

The laboratory's public launch phase culminated in the Zhongyuan Food Laboratory Scientists Conference, held together with the Luohe Innovation and Development Conference at the Luohe International Convention Center on 31 January and 1 February 2023. Henan University's account of the meeting records that it invited three academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Pang Guofang, Xie Jianping and Ren Fazheng, together with experts and scholars from universities and institutes across China; a fuller account puts the attendance at 51 experts and scholars from 21 universities and institutes, and the number of chief scientists invited from well-known institutions such as South China University of Technology and China Agricultural University at 24. Provincial departments for industry and information technology, science and technology, and commerce sent responsible officials. The conference served both as a scientific assembly and as the occasion on which the laboratory formalised its network of university bases and enterprise partners.

Director Ren Fazheng and the academic committee

The laboratory is directed by Ren Fazheng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, who personally introduced its operation mechanism to partner universities at the 2023 conference. Around the director, the laboratory built an academic structure drawing on senior food scientists: Pang Guofang and Xie Jianping joined Ren among the academicians associated with its appointed teams. At the 2023 conference Henan University signed an agreement on base construction with Ren Fazheng, under which Professor Jihong Huang of the university's School of Agricultural Sciences was appointed a member and deputy director of the laboratory's Academic Committee, two Henan University professors were appointed chief scientists, and four of its teachers were appointed research scientists. That pattern, repeated across partner institutions, shows the laboratory operating as a networked provincial platform: a Luohe headquarters with named chief scientists and research scientists recruited from university food-science faculties.

Facilities and investment

Strategic reporting on the laboratory's first months records substantial completed hardware in Luohe: a central experimental building covering 12,000 square metres, a pilot base of 8,000 square metres and an incubation centre of 10,000 square metres, with total investment reaching 650 million yuan. The three elements correspond to the laboratory's intended chain of work: central laboratories for research, a pilot base for scaling processes beyond bench scale, and an incubation centre for converting results into enterprises and products. Few Chinese provincial food laboratories publish a comparably specific early facilities record, and the figures help explain how the laboratory could sign enterprise cooperation agreements and host joint facilities, including the later Louis Dreyfus Company laboratory, from its Luohe base.

Research teams and directions

The same reporting records that the laboratory formed thirteen innovative teams conducting systematic research around six key directions related to the development of Henan's food industry. The directions themselves were framed around the needs of the provincial food sector rather than around a single commodity. The laboratory's service model was described as one in which enterprises place orders and scientists accept them: it conducted technical-demand surveys across thirty-six companies, including the meat processor Shuanghui and Zhongda Hengyuan, resulting in over fifty cooperative intentions. Shuanghui Development's president, Ma Xiangjie, was quoted as planning to co-build results-conversion bases with the laboratory, focusing on breakthrough technologies such as low-temperature meat preservation and plant-based protein development. Those two examples, meat preservation and plant protein, indicate the applied end of the laboratory's remit, complementing the basic food science of its university bases.

The six university bases

At the 2023 conference the laboratory signed agreements with six universities, including China Agricultural University and Henan University of Technology, to jointly build research bases. Henan University is documented in detail as one of the six bases: its vice-president Xuelu Wang led a group of twelve teachers and students to the conference, signed the base-construction agreement with the director, and expressed the hope that the laboratory would support the university's relevant disciplines, while Ren Fazheng expressed the hope that Henan University, as one of the six bases of Zhongyuan Food Laboratory, would keep moving forward in relevant research fields and contribute to the industrial development of Henan Province and other regions. The base system distributes the laboratory's research capacity across established food-science faculties while keeping its headquarters, pilot facilities and enterprise interface in Luohe.

Enterprise partnerships

Alongside the university agreements, the laboratory signed strategic cooperation agreements with eighteen well-known food enterprises at the 2023 conference, including Shuanghui Development and Sanquan Foods, both major Henan food companies. Luohe's municipal government supported the model with policy documents on accelerating technological innovation and on evaluating innovation performance, as part of a wider effort to build the city into a high ground for food-industry innovation. The enterprise network is central to the laboratory's design: rather than publishing research and waiting for uptake, it surveys company technical needs, matches them to its thirteen innovation teams, and co-builds conversion bases with the firms concerned. The approach reflects Luohe's position as a food-processing city, where a provincial laboratory can reach meat, frozen-food and ingredient manufacturers within its own urban industrial base.

The Louis Dreyfus Company joint laboratory

On 24 September 2025 Louis Dreyfus Company, the global agricultural commodities and food-ingredients group, inaugurated a new laboratory in Luohe run jointly with the Food Laboratory of Zhongyuan, which its release described as a leading provincial research and innovation organisation. Covering an area of 930 square metres, the joint laboratory focuses on collaboration opportunities and projects enhancing human nutrition, pet food and animal feed applications, as part of the company's global strategy to expand its value chain further downstream through more value-added products and ingredients. It leverages the company's Food and Feed Solutions Platform portfolio, including lecithin, vitamin E, glycerin and emulsifiers, to develop food-ingredient options with nutritional and functional qualities responding to evolving Chinese market demand. Jerrity Chen, the company's head of North Asia, cited Luohe's position as a major food hub in China, the company's global expertise across the food value chain, and the state-of-the-art facilities and research capabilities of the Food Laboratory of Zhongyuan as the combination that would accelerate growth in value-added food and feed ingredients.

Applications: nutrition, pet food and feed

The joint laboratory's stated work gives a precise picture of the applied research the Luohe laboratory hosts. Shengshu Huang, the company's chief technology officer and head of specialty feed ingredients for North Asia, said the facility would enable engagement with leading food and feed companies in the region to develop tailored formulations, dosage forms and innovative application scenarios for targeted segments including pet food, beverages, snacks and baked goods, giving lysolecithin applications in food production as an example. He also looked forward to leveraging the Food Laboratory of Zhongyuan's research hubs at renowned academic institutions to advance food science in China. The joint laboratory followed the company's groundbreaking in June 2025 of a Food Technology Park in Dongjiakou, Qingdao, placing the Luohe facility within a broader company investment in Chinese food-ingredient research, with the provincial laboratory as its local scientific partner.

Place in Henan's provincial-laboratory system

Zhongyuan Food Laboratory belongs to the generation of laboratories created when Henan rebuilt its provincial-laboratory system in the early 2020s, a process the province described as reconstruction and reshaping intended to integrate Henan into the national strategic scientific and technological force system, with provincial laboratories serving as reserves for national laboratories. Within that system the food laboratory carries the food-science mandate for a province that is both a major agricultural producer and home, in Luohe, to one of China's best-known food-processing cities. Its record since 2022, an academician director, six university bases, thirteen innovation teams, eighteen enterprise agreements at its launch conference, purpose-built research, pilot and incubation facilities, and a joint laboratory with a global ingredients company, makes it one of the most fully documented of Henan's provincial laboratories and the clearest example of the province's model of a laboratory built directly around a local pillar industry.