ShanghaiJune 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s catering market size exceeded 5.7 trillion yuan in 2025, highlighting the increasingly prominent role of the catering industry in boosting domestic demand and absorbing employment. Against this backdrop, the condiment industry is also accelerating its shift from simply selling products to deeply integrating into local catering ecosystems. Totole, together with Chaotianxiang and Haoji, has built a full-series product matrix ranging from basic seasonings to compound flavors, embedding them into local cuisines. From community cooking classes to professional culinary competitions, and from home-style Northeastern dishes to Northwestern beef noodles, Totole is continuously driving the inheritance and innovation of traditional local flavors through skills training, talent development, and customized products.
Delivering Skills to Doorsteps: A Spoonful of Umami Opens Micro-Entrepreneurship Paths
This year, Totole’s Shenyang branch partnered with local communities to bring home-cooking skills training directly to residents, offering public welfare courses targeting unemployed individuals, full-time mothers, and flexible workers. The training adopts a format of “theoretical explanation + step-by-step demonstration + detailed breakdown,” where professional chefs teach easy-to-operate dishes suitable for home and small-scale business scenarios, such as jelly-like egg cake and chicken broth-slicked meat slices. Guidance is provided on key aspects like heat control, seasoning, and cooking procedures to help participants master practical culinary skills.
These courses focus on meeting the needs of community residents for income growth and life skills enhancement, helping to lower the barriers to micro-entrepreneurship such as stall operations and private home dining. Ahead of the Dragon Boat Festival, Totole’s culinary team also visited communities to host seasonal themed activities, enriching residents’ cultural and spiritual lives through traditional food culture education and interactive experiences like weaving five-color ropes.
Promoting Education Through Competitions to Nurture Talent, Injecting New Vitality into Local Culinary Heritage
In the northwestern region, Totole collaborated with Gansu New Oriental Advanced Technical School in March to hold the “Totole” Cup Culinary Skills Competition, with over 100 students participating in six categories, including hot Chinese dishes, decorative cold platters, and Chinese-style pastries. The competition invited master-level Chinese culinary judges to score based on knife skills, heat control, creativity, and seasoning, and showcased over 80 student entries, with representatives from multiple catering enterprises visiting and exchanging ideas. This model enhances students’ traditional skills and innovative awareness, strengthens school-enterprise connections, and provides students with more practical and employment opportunities.
Notably, in the future, Totole will collaborate with two New Oriental schools in Lanzhou and Yinchuan to integrate product solutions into daily teaching and provide regional catering solutions. The “Umami Workshop” will supply schools with standard teaching modules, a national snack standard manual, and a product application manual. Additionally, a “Master Apprentice” program will be launched, with culinary and regional mentors giving regular lessons, and four annual “Master Hall of Fame” and “Master Promotion Meetings” will conduct online and offline interactive teaching to cultivate future culinary talents. R&D scholarships will be jointly evaluated by school mentors and Totole mentors, with quarterly assessments based on new dish development and product application promotion, awarding generous prizes to the top three.
On broader professional competition platforms, Totole supported events in 2025 such as the National Golden Chef Dish Display and Exchange Invitational and the Western Cuisine Cooking Skills Competition. At the World Chinese Culinary Championship, Totole’s concentrated chicken broth and three-fresh chicken bouillon were designated as official products, providing umami support for seven major professional events. The outstanding performance of these products strongly demonstrates Totole’s ability to meet the core needs of professional catering—”efficiency, stability, and flavor”—while also enhancing the expressiveness of local flavors in competitions.
Totole understands that local specialties are key vehicles for the industrialization of catering. The Lanzhou beef noodle industry employs a large workforce, with standardization and flavor consistency being critical for industrial upgrading. In January this year, Totole partnered with the Lanzhou Beef Noodle Industry Association to launch a chicken bouillon seasoning specifically developed for Lanzhou beef noodles. This product integrates seamlessly into all noodle scenarios, enhancing the flavor through umami blending while respecting the classic recipe, making the broth even more delicious.
From community cooking classes in Shenyang, Northeast China, to beef noodle industry collaborations in Lanzhou, Northwest China, Totole’s reach extends from Shanghai to all corners of the country, deeply engaging in the inheritance and innovation of local flavors with a posture closer to industry needs. As a member of the Nestlé Group, Totole upholds Nestlé’s “Creating Shared Value” philosophy, leveraging the full product matrix of Totole, Chaotianxiang, and Haoji to weave together an ecosystem chain of community empowerment, talent development, and industrial collaboration, deeply infusing umami technology into the fabric of local cuisines. This not only effectively helps more people acquire practical skills and broaden income channels but also breathes new life into traditional local foods, contributing a warm umami force to the high-quality development of the catering industry.