On one day of 1905, when a German businessman hunted in the southern foot of Taiping Mountain of Qingdao, he saw a few little hedgedogs gathering nearby a puddle of clean spring and drinking. He bent over to drink several mouths of water and felt extremely sweet instantly. Subsequently, the first Chinese well of mineral water named “Hedgedog Well” was dug among the deep underground granite. The legend of the time-honored Laoshan mineral water begins with this “Hedgedog Well” and goes on for hundreds of years.
The utmost reason why Laoshan mineral water can be still popular after hundreds of years is its particularly favorable water quality endowed by nature. In 1930, Rodeway, a German doctor of chemistry trial-produced and bottled the mineral water from the “Hedgedog Well”. Subsequently German scientists monitored the water quality and confirmed that Laoshan mineral water had extremely high health care and medicinal value and had the property of curing many chronic diseases, which gave Laoshan mineral water sudden fame. At the time there was also a complimentary poem saying: “Immortal herbs living in the sea cannot be comparable to the Laoshan mineral water.”
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the “Laoshan” brand mineral is getting more and more influential. At present, the Qingdao Laoshan Mineral Water Co., Ltd. producing Laoshan mineral water is a large scaled enterprise having a few modern manufacturing bases. The increasingly strict demand for product quality makes this time-honored brand of Laoshan mineral water more and more excellent.
In the manufacturing base of the Qingdao Laoshan Mineral Water Co., Ltd., the visitors can have an exhaustive view of the production process of Laoshan mineral water on the glass wall of the corridor. On many fully automatic PET bottled water production lines, the mineral water from the depths of Laoshan Mountain will undergo a dozen of processes including sand filtering, carbon filtration, multilevel refined filtration, disinfection system, and terminal titanium filtration to get rid of impurities and retain mineral substances and microelements beneficial to human body. The water is 100% automatically bottled in airtight and sterilized environment and stacked into the warehouse. Moreover in order to protect limited water resource, three-level water resource protection mechanism has been constructed strictly according to the national standard for every well where Laoshan mineral water comes from.
In the ranking list of the most valuable Chinese brands issued by the World Brand Lab this year, the Qingdao Laoshan Mineral Water Co., Ltd. has been selected as the only mineral water enterprise. The value of the mineral water brand “Laoshan” has reached 4.876 billion yuan.
An inside expert indicates that the lasting success of Laoshan mineral water derives from its craftsmanship seeking for innovation and improvement continually. In the Yangkou manufacturing base of Qingdao Laoshan Mineral Water Co., Ltd., Tao Lian, the manager who is known for his love for digging into everything is one of the outstanding inheritors of this craftsmanship.
At the end of 2011, Tao Lian led his team and overcame many difficulties. They took only two months to finish the installation and debugging of a newly introduced fully automatic bottled water production line and enhanced the operating efficiency of this new production line to above 95% and 99% in maximum, 5% higher than the operating efficiency of the most advanced production line in the world and several millions of yuan can be saved annually.
With the craftsmanship of eternally pursuing innovation and perfection, Laoshan Mineral Water, this time-honored enterprise, has continuously developed many new products, outside of the huge success in mineral water. Two products namely Laoshan cola and Laoshan Oldenlandia water under its umbrella have both become classic brands in the market.
Laoshan cola is the first carbonated beverage independently developed by China and has a unique position in the fierce market competition. To make this beverage, many natural herb ingredients including smoked jujube, radix angelicae, galanga and clove and a profusion of carbon dioxide are added into Laoshan mineral water. Different from other cola products, sugar substitutes are never put in the manufacturing process and only genuine granulated sugar is used. The product enjoys a very high popularity among consumers.
However, Laoshan Oldenlandia water has recently gained sudden fame for its name “the most unpleasant beverage in China” on the Internet. According to a technician of Qingdao Laoshan Mineral Water Co., Ltd., the white-banded snake herb water is made of the extract of Oldenlandia diffusa as the main ingredient and has the function of relieving heat and removing toxic material and helping digestion. Over 60 years ago, the weather in Southeast Asian countries like Singapore was very hot and humid, many Chinese people lived a very miserable life and didn’t want to spend money on seeing a doctor. After getting this information, the technicians in Laoshan Mineral Water Co., Ltd. at that time studied many medicine dictionaries and found that Oldenlandia growing in Yunnan and Guangxi was sweet and cool in property. Therefore Laoshan Oldenlandia water was developed and reputed as the Divine Water from Homeland by the Chinese living in Southeast Asia.
Currently Qingdao Laoshan Mineral Water Co., Ltd. actively gets involved into the construction of “the Belt and Road” and let this time-honored Loashan mineral water “ go out” to open branches. At present besides having stable market share in Southeast Asia, Laoshan Mineral Water has entered Africa with the help of a state-owned construction company. The export volume has increased by more than 50% within less than a year.
