The world’s largest caviar company is located in China. But how did a country that traditionally doesn’t eat caviar come to dominate the market?
The road to worldwide recognition for Chinese caviar maker Kaluga Queen has been a long and winding one.
Started in 1998 in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province, Kaluga Queen today accounts for a third of global caviar production. But it had to overcome doubts about its products coming from a country more associated with food scandals than haute cuisine.
After two decades of overseas promotion, the breakthrough came in 2018 when Lufthansa, Germany’s largest airline, struck a deal with Kaluga Queen to be its sole caviar supplier for its first-class cabins.
Kaluga Queen’s co-founder, Xia Yongtao, says it took nearly a decade to win them over.
“We put in our first tender way back in 2009 when we attended the Brussels seafood expo,” he says. “Lufthansa people thought it was a joke for Chinese to produce caviar, as China never had a caviar consumption culture.”
In 2010, Kaluga Queen’s tender for Lufthansa was rejected again. Yet by then, German caviar distributors had unknowingly been using Kaluga Queen products for several years to stock high-end restaurants and supermarkets. They were just sold in tins bearing the packaging of other famous brands, including Imperial Caviar from Germany.
“No one read the small print saying the origin of production was China,” Xia says. Kaluga Queen got a rare chance to show its quality in 2010 when Lufthansa’s Italian supplier came up 200 kilograms (440 pounds) short. To make up for the shortfall, the airline bought what it thought was German caviar.
“In 2011, we went to the same expo for our third tender,” Xia explains. “When Lufthansa rejected us again, our German distributor told them their 2010 shortfall stocks were actually produced by us.”
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Lufthansa did a blind tasting. Food experts and airline executives sampled caviar from Kaluga Queen and nine other suppliers. Kaluga Queen’s caviar was rated the best.
The caviar presented for tasting came from a nine-year-old hybrid sturgeon bred from Amur sturgeon and kaluga sturgeon from the Amur River basin in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang Province. The caviar it produces is large, chewy, and creamy.
“Coming in second was our caviar made from eight-year-old Amur sturgeon, which is chewy and fruity,” says Xia.
The blind tasting results were still not enough to persuade Lufthansa, and the company sent a team to Zhejiang to check out Kaluga Queen’s fish farms in Qiandao Lake. “It’s a pristine lake [four-fifths] the size of Singapore,” says Xia.
“Lufthansa staff took random products from our stocks to do another blind test in Germany. Our caviar was again ranked top in the test.”
In 2018, Kaluga Queen took over from the Italian caviar producer as Lufthansa’s sole supplier. After this breakthrough, other clients, including Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific, soon followed.
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Caviar is the name given to the unfertilized eggs, or roe, of sturgeon, a large fish that lives in rivers and lakes.
Kaluga Queen produces six types of caviar, from sturgeon that are between seven and 20 years old and sourced from Russia, Heilongjiang, Germany, Hungary and the Caspian Sea. They range in price from 11,800 yuan ($1,800) to 180,000 yuan a kilogram. Caviar from 20-year-old beluga sturgeon in the Caspian Sea is the most expensive.
Of the 100 tons of caviar sold by Kaluga Queen in 2019, 92% was exported overseas, with the European Union accounting for half of the total.
“France is our biggest market, taking 13 tons of our caviar,” Xia says. “We are the supplier of 27 three-Michelin-star restaurants there.” The restaurants include Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée and Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen.
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Kaluga Queen’s next major goal is to expand in the domestic market. “We set up a [sales] team in Shanghai in 2007, selling only several kilograms of caviar that year, [but] last year, the figure was several tons,” Xia says. “While we started in Western restaurants in Shanghai, our real target is Chinese restaurants across China. That’s where real sizable growth lies.”
One Chinese restaurant which Kaluga Queen works with is Da Dong Peking duck restaurant in Beijing. It offers roasted duck skin with caviar. “Former U.S. President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle tasted that dish in Beijing on their [2014] trip to China,” Xia says.
Another Beijing restaurant, M’Master Hall Fortune Pot, uses Kaluga Queen caviar to make two tofu dishes. “One is sea urchin tofu and caviar,” says Wang Yang, a chef at M’Master Hall Fortune Pot. “The other is deep-fried stinky tofu with caviar. Our clients love the dishes. We never use any overseas caviar brands.”
Kaluga Queen uses scientific methods—based on tradition, Xia notes—to rear the sturgeon, all of which are descendants of wild fish. Xia says Kaluga Queen’s success has helped lessen the biodiversity crisis caused by the overfishing of wild sturgeon, which are critically endangered.
The Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, along with experts from Iran, Germany, Russia, and Hungary, helped Kaluga Queen set up a high-tech environment that mimics the habitat of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest saltwater lake, from where female beluga sturgeon, when mature at around 10 years of age, migrate up rivers to lay their eggs.
Kaluga Queen rears its sturgeon in an area of about 100 acres in Zhejiang, including part of Qiandao Lake. It hatches and raises them in the lake, then transports mature fish to the Wuxi River in Quzhou.
“The waters of Qiandao Lake are still,” Xia says. “The lack of currents or the need to swim upstream means the fish are fatty.
“Their roe is surrounded by fats which affect the caviar’s quality. Fish which burn much energy through swimming upstream produce roe that is tastier and richer.”
After about two years in the Wuxi River, the sturgeon swim upstream as their wild counterparts would do.
The fish are then killed and the roe harvested.
Adapted from an article first published in the South China Morning Post.
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