(All images: FTV)The founder of the brands, Chung Chiu-hsiang (鍾秋香), initially wanted to resolve problems of too much surplus cabbage and low prices. Gleaning inspiration from her mother-in-law’s homemade Hakka pickles, Chung took the unsold vegetables and pickled them, to ease the farmers’ dilemma. Chung shared that she herself grew up in the countryside and would also help make pickles. She said Hakka-style pickling is a very varied and complex traditional cuisine that employs different methods of pickling and fermentation to make such familiar dishes as suan cai (pickled cabbage), fu cai (pickled mustard leaves) and meigan cai (molded dried vegetables), as well as yellow soybean paste, soy milk and kumquat preserve (桔醬). These Hakka pickles can be part of a daily diet, can be given as souvenirs, and are a popular choice at Lunar New Year.
In addition to her Hakka pickles, Chung Chiu-hsiang also collected the homemade fruit vinegar made by the mothers of the community and promoted it as a local and reassuring fermented product. In recent years, Chung has actively been targeting overseas markets, bringing her products to Japan to enter in competitions and expanding the international visibility of Hakka pickled goods. She asserts that pickling in Taiwan is as good as in Japan, that Taiwan has quality fruit and plenty of traditional fermentation wisdom.
Though the cooperative continued to develop, Chung was concerned about the villagers getting on in age and fields gradually going uncultivated because of a lack of young people returning home to work them. Because of this, Chung took the initiative to get in touch with returning young people and offer them the cooperative’s agriculture platform information, as well as helping farmers to develop processed agricultural goods and learn about packaging and marketing to raise the value of their produce. She hopes to create sustainable livelihoods to provide young people returning to the countryside with a future.
The Dapu Cooperative combines local pickling culture with self-grown produce to develop a community economy industry, changing the sales model for village community agricultural produce and guiding residents to use the pickling and fermentation techniques handed down by their Hakka ancestors to develop agricultural products with more diversified value. The cooperative does its own quality control and marketing planning, giving careful thought to the design of exquisite packaging, making processed agricultural goods into a community economy.
Dapu Cooperative’s Hakka Mama Pickle Workshop uses the wisdom of ancestors, continuing their fermentation techniques and traditional culture and carrying them forward, continually striving in business, marketing and developing new markets to be an outstanding model for agricultural business transformation -- and also hoping to make Gaoshu Township into Pingtung’s home of pickling.