Mengniu Dairy Industrial Park

Mengniu Dairy maintains an industrial park and visitor centre about 70 kilometres west of Hohhot in the town of Helinge'er, which has been developed as a "dairy culture tourism" destination. The facility includes a processing plant tour (showing the full production chain from raw milk to packaged product), a museum of Chinese dairy history, and a demonstration farm with the large Holstein cows that supply the operation. The tour is more interesting than it sounds — the scale of the operation is genuinely impressive and the Chinese dairy industry's trajectory from minimal consumption in the 1980s to world-scale production in the 2000s is a significant economic story.

The nearby Yili Group also offers similar industrial tourism from its main Hohhot campus, closer to the city. For travellers interested in food systems and industrial agriculture, a visit to one of these facilities gives context to the grassland landscapes you have been admiring from horseback. Book in advance; the tours are popular with Chinese domestic tourists.

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A story
Mengniu and Yili, both founded in Hohhot in the 1990s, together supply roughly 40 percent of China's dairy products and together constitute one of the largest dairy operations on earth. The two companies are rivals with adjacent origins: Mengniu was founded in 1999 by Niu Gensheng, who had previously been one of the founding executives at Yili. The story of their competition — a Chinese corporate saga involving industrial espionage, a major food safety scandal, and eventually the domination of a vast national market — is as interesting as the facilities themselves.

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