Nǐ hǎo! We arrive at the halfway point of our journey with this blog post. We have learned so much and have developed great friendships during our travels thus far, and we are excited for what the last half of the trip will bring for us.

Today’s itinerary includes a trip to OSI Foods Co. in “rural” central Henan Province. We use the term “rural” lightly as it is home to 94 million people. OSI is one of our largest IBIP sponsors and is also home to a couple of IBIP alums. George Witchek traveled on the last IBIP trip to China back in 2010. Each day of this trip has been an exciting adventure, but seeing a former IBIP participant actively involved in China’s poultry supply is perhaps the most valuable experience that we have had yet. Just four short years ago, he was one of twenty-four students traveling through China much like we are today. Now he is working in a high-level position helping to solve China’s food supply chain problems. His journey after IBIP has shown us the opportunities that are available in the world, and we are thankful for the time that he has dedicated to us.

During our visit we had the opportunity to hear from some of OSI’s key personnel including Johnmy Scott (a Texan), and Joon Wong (from the Shanghai corporate office) along with other local Henan OSI executives. They told us about how the OSI and DaOSI facilities operate and how the 2 facilities across the street from each other work together to create a vertically integrated operation perfect for the high demands of poultry production in China. OSI owns the further processing facility where they take the raw chicken and turn it into the McDonalds products we all love. This facility is brand new and state of the art.  In fact, it is not even finished being built.  Phase one consisted of using half of the current building space to produce 4 key poultry products for the McDonald’s market in China on a mass production scale.  Phase two will be completed in the next couple of years and will consist of building more production lines of the same four products.  This is one of the largest further processing plants in the world and is quite impressive!

DaOSI is the primary processing facility across the street where they raise and slaughter live chickens. The entire facility includes a hatchery, broiler farm, feed mill, and slaughterhouse. Taking a tour around these high tech, innovate facilities was amazing and a unique opportunity none of us will ever forget.

OSI is McDonald’s main supplier of protein throughout the world. Today, we enjoyed a sampling of fresh chicken McNuggets from the OSI quality assurance test kitchen. One interesting fact that we learned about them was that McDonalds has a patent on the shape of their McNuggets. You are probably familiar with them: the boot, the diamond, the ball, and the bowtie.

Once we said good-bye to our generous hosts at OSI, we were off to the Zhengzhou airport. Our journey continued, but we said farewell to Lynnea. She left to spend a day in Shanghai before leaving for the United States to celebrate her retirement. It has been a pleasure having her with us for her last IBIP and we thank her for everything that she has done for the University of Illinois. It was then time for us to board our own flight to Hangzhou and Zhejiang University.

After a bit of turbulence and a somewhat bumpy landing we arrived in Hangzhou where we then continued on to the ZJU campus dorms where we are staying that evening and the next. Our cultural and educational tours of Beijing and Luohe have been incredible so far and we look forward to finishing the last part of the trip in the city of Shanghai.

A: …..to become a chicken nugget!!

As usual, check us out in photos on Flickr!