At present, many rice noodle and vermicelli manufacturers are in a difficult situation of shrinking product sales, rising production costs, and sharp declines in profits. In the face of difficulties, if the production enterprise does nothing, it is a passive policy. If we look for a way out with innovation, it is the best way to be proactive.

Innovation, the key point is the innovation of thinking. Thinking innovation is not nonsense, but understanding, researching, following the law of development of things and attaching importance to and relying on science and technology.

1.Open up more sales channels with innovation

Innovative products are an effective way to open up the market and increase sales. Unfortunately, the awareness of product innovation in many corporate leaders is still weak. A long-term leader of a company that has been producing instant rice noodles for a long time was very touched by this, he wrote: "Product innovation is insufficient, since the existence of instant rice noodles and vermicelli for nearly 20 years, there has been no improvement and major changes in product quality and ingredients, ......", he told a real side of the industry.

In the face of difficulties, some production enterprises will shift from the production of a single product to the production of multiple products. The added products are already produced by other companies, and there are no innovative ingredients. This is the phenomenon of "siege" that often occurs when the industry is at a low ebb: people outside the city want to rush in, and people inside the city want to escape. Manufacturers believe that even if it is an old product on the market, there may be more hope, but the competition between novices and veterans will be more difficult, there will be more difficulties, and the risk will not be small.

To innovate products, we must follow the evolution of the product market, investigate and study the needs and changes of consumption; There must be a new breakthrough in quality and taste. To give you an example of the success of an innovative product: not long ago, a new product called "Cover Noodles" appeared on the market, which was very flexible and tasteful, and suddenly became a well-known new product in the market. It is understood that the production equipment is modified from the idle self-ripening machine and extrusion machine that were originally used for the production of cross-bridge rice noodles. Its production process and production equipment are completely different from traditional flour products, which makes the product unique and innovative.

As long as we can get rid of the inertia resistance of traditional thinking, the product innovation space is very broad. For example, the formula of raw materials can be ever-changing, and each change will affect the characteristics and taste of the product, and most domestic manufacturers are conservative in this regard. A well-known Japan rice noodle manufacturer in Thailand produces instant rice noodles and straight rice noodles with 30% potato starch or 50% tapioca starch; In Paris, France, there is a company that produces semi-wet and dry pho from a raw material containing 25% potato starch. Changes in the production process can also change the characteristics and taste of the product. For example, in order to improve the rehydration performance of brewing and the softness of vermicelli, cross-bridge rice noodles are no longer resteamed after self-ripening and extrusion. There was once a production enterprise that added a resteaming process in order to reduce the spitting rate of cross-bridge rice noodles, but the rehydration became worse and it was inconvenient to eat. Some fresh-keeping rice noodles with high water content must undergo anti-aging treatment, otherwise the quality of the product will deteriorate with the increase of storage time.

2.Innovation reduces marketing and production costs
With innovative products, it is possible to increase sales. With sales, it is necessary to reduce costs, otherwise it is difficult to improve the economic benefits of decline. In terms of management costs, there is more room for the cost of sales to be changed; In reducing production costs, reducing production workers, improving product yield and saving energy are the main directions of innovation and production cost reduction.

2)Innovation to reduce the cost of product sales

Among the administrative costs, the cost of sales is the most variable. Over the years, the larger rice noodle and vermicelli production enterprises have not hesitated to hire a large number of promoters to compete for the market, supplemented by the encouragement of more sales and heavy rewards. This leads to an excessively high cost of sales. The bigger hidden danger is that the decision-makers of the production enterprises and the product promoters pursue different goals, and the two go in opposite directions. The goal pursued by the company's leadership is to expand sales, increase profits, and further catch up with competitors; In order to expand sales performance, promoters can put forward many reasons, and take advantage of the leadership's eagerness to occupy the market, forcing products to be promoted at low prices, resulting in a disguised increase in sales expenses and squeezing the profit margins of enterprises. In order to get a big reward, the promoter even overstocked a large number of products in the inventory and falsely reported the sales volume (after the fact, he made an excuse to return it). Encouraged by this false information, the leadership of production enterprises will lose no time in increasing investment in order to expand production as soon as possible to meet the needs of the market, and as a result, production enterprises will suffer huge losses, and some even close down. There are many real-world examples of this. The most typical example occurred in the bridge rice noodle market inflated period, many production enterprises were affected by false information, blindly expanded production, and irrationally promoted, resulting in heavy losses, so that the entire industry is still in a trough.

The sales concept of high-cost irrational sales, which violates the laws of the market, has hindered the sales innovation thinking of the leaders and decision-makers of many food production enterprises for many years. More than 10 years ago, there was a large and well-known food production enterprise in the north, which introduced the relatively advanced Japan udon production equipment at that time. With a large and high-standard factory building and the introduction of advanced production equipment, we produce udon noodles in large quantities. Production was soon discontinued due to the lack of sales. When some inspectors asked about the reason for the suspension of production, the person in charge of the enterprise analyzed: The main reason is that the publicity and promotion of the product is insufficient, and if one or two hundred million yuan can be spent on advertising, sales will not be ......a problem. This erroneous sales concept that believes that products that do not meet the needs of the market can still rely on ultra-high sales and publicity expenses to open up the market is not unique. Later, the collapse of the five-grain rice farm was similar. Therefore, we should get rid of this rather common misconception in the food industry, and follow the laws of the market with new thinking, first of all, we must investigate and study the actual requirements of the market for products, and produce products that are as close as possible to the majority of consumers. On this basis, you can promote products, you can get twice the result with half the effort, which can greatly save sales expenses and reduce sales costs.
The main point of the new sales thinking is that it is necessary to form a sales mechanism that is consistent with the goals pursued by the enterprise and the goals pursued by the promoters and goes in the same direction. This mechanism can improve sales efficiency and reduce the cost of sales. Traditional sales methods are facing challenges from the Internet sales model. We should pay enough attention to new things, and carefully study them in combination with the specific situation of the enterprise. Theoretically, online sales can save advertising costs and traditional marketing costs, and the convenience of online shopping and low commodity prices can attract more consumers and make products be promoted at a broader level. On the other hand, one of the characteristics of online shopping is that the selling price of goods will be significantly lower than the selling price in the traditional market, forcing manufacturers to embark on the road of no return to reduce prices and promotions, and increase the cost of sales in disguise. In addition, it is inevitable that there will be ultra-low price competition of similar fake and inferior products in online sales, and there will be a dilemma. The trade-off depends on the comparison of gains and losses; It depends on whether a win-win mechanism can be formed in which the goals pursued by enterprises and the goals pursued by e-commerce can basically go in the same direction.

1)Innovation to reduce production costs and improve the economic benefits of enterprises, a very important aspect is to reduce production costs. The main measures that can effectively reduce production costs are to improve labor productivity, improve the yield of products and reduce energy consumption.

In fact, for a long time, most of the production enterprises have made unremitting efforts in these three aspects, and generally have the feeling that it is difficult to move forward. This shows that it has entered the deep water area where it is very difficult to reduce production costs. If you don't get rid of the traditional inertial thinking, it is indeed difficult to make a difference; If you change to a positive and innovative mindset, you can make a difference.

To improve labor productivity, the first thing that production enterprises think of is to improve the mechanization and automation level of production equipment, so as to reduce production personnel and save labor costs. However, most of the decision-makers of production enterprises will have the feeling that it is difficult to move forward an inch. In fact, this is mainly constrained by traditional inertial thinking. In the face of this kind of problem, many veteran experts and masters who have been engaged in production practice for a long time hold on to the old thinking and experience, and deny the possibility of innovation. For example, in the production of rice noodles, there is generally a process of mixing and mixing the main materials, auxiliary materials and secondary materials with water at room temperature, or adding water to the main materials and injecting steam into the process of mixing at high temperature. For a long time, all domestic production enterprises have used manual operation of intermittent production equipment. Its disadvantage is that the labor intensity is very large, it is difficult to clean up, and the front and rear processes can not be automated production docking, consumes more labor, and the mixing quality is unstable. There is a large rice flour production enterprise in Guangzhou, which has been using this backward equipment for more than 20 years. About 10 years ago, someone proposed to the main leaders of the company to change the outdated equipment to a high-temperature mixing equipment for automatic and continuous production, which was unanimously denied. About three years ago, the main leaders of the company were forced by the situation of rising labor and production costs, broke through the shackles of traditional inertial thinking, and decided to innovate and find a way. In the process of innovation, it was not affirmed by the master and the old expert, and there was also a lack of cooperation from scientific research forces, so it took a detour. After spending more than one million yuan and more than a year of repeated trials and improvements, we finally successfully developed the advanced equipment for automatic continuous high-temperature mixing of rice flour production in China. Since it was put into production, the effect has been good, and a number of labor has been saved because the upper and lower processes can be automated. Since the mixing time and temperature can be controlled automatically, the mixing quality can be maintained very well and consistently. This is a very successful example of innovation in deep waters.

The production of straight rice noodles is a labor-intensive industry. There are three processes that consume the most labor (except for the packaging process): intermittent mixing, intermittent steaming, and artificial loosening. In recent years, one company has made breakthroughs in these three aspects, saving a lot of labor. It should be said that the positive effect of the success of innovation is the main one; On the other hand, as with anything new, there will be certain shortcomings and shortcomings. However, this is a matter of improvement and improvement in production, and we cannot be held back by this, lose the courage to innovate, and see no way out.

Rice noodles and vermicelli are the most labor-intensive processes in the production of instant rice noodles and vermicelli. In products such as fresh-keeping powder, the technology of automatic fixed weight and automatic box feeding has progressed, which needs to be improved. For the dry products of steamed flakes, automatic fixed weight and box are available in technical theory, but because they involve multiple processes in the past, the integrity of the powder flakes is affected, and it is very difficult to realize, and there is no feasible equipment for production at present, and continuous innovation efforts are required in the future. Dry products that have been aged and washed with water are the most difficult to achieve automatic fixed weight forming and automatic box feeding. About 20 years ago, there was an automatic weight-setting device in Japan, which used a suction cup to suck rice noodles and noodles soaked in water into a volumetric quantification. Due to the cup knife cutting, many chopped vermicelli are produced, and the water content of the product varies greatly depending on the amount of time it has been soaked in water. This kind of quantitative equipment that sacrifices product quality is difficult to be accepted by production enterprises. There have been many false propaganda from equipment manufacturers in China, promising to supply any rice vermicelli automatic weighting, forming, and automatic box dropping equipment, which has made many manufacturers gullible and suffer economic losses. Therefore, when entering the deep water area of innovation, we must respect objective laws and attach importance to scientific analysis and identification. For innovative projects that are technically difficult to solve for a while, it will be more effective to explore new ideas for step-by-step implementation. For example, there is a large-scale production enterprise of ready-to-eat potato vermicelli in the north, after thinking hard about solving the problem of automatic fixed weight, forming and automatic box dropping, jumping out of the frame of fixed weight forming and box dropping tied to each other, first automating the automatic box dropping that is easy to achieve in technology, although it still retains the manual weight forming, but also saves some operators, and receives the effect of reducing labor costs.

3.Innovation and energy saving

1)Innovative technology in wire extrusion reduces energy consumption
In order to improve the production hygiene level of rice noodles and vermicelli, the materials used in the manufacture of extrusion and wire extrusion equipment have transitioned from the original carbon steel and cast iron to stainless steel. However, the viscous resistance of stainless steel to the material is very large, so that most of the materials rotate with the stainless steel screw, and the actual extruded material only accounts for 10~20% of the theoretical calculation of the extrusion amount. That is, most of the energy is used for the rubbing of the powder. In addition, the stainless steel vermicelli forming template has great resistance to the material, which makes the extrusion pressure increase significantly. If the extrusion spiral is converted to food-grade plastic (which has been calculated to be strong enough to withstand the extrusion pressure) and Teflon embedded modules are used, the extrusion efficiency can be improved, the extrusion power can be significantly reduced, energy can be saved, and the surface quality of the vermicelli can be improved. The large-scale wire extrusion machine, with a power of 12kw~36kw, is a large energy consumer of equipment. According to preliminary estimates, the innovation can save one-third to two-two-quarters of the electricity and reduce the cost of energy consumption.

2) Get rid of inertial thinking and replace equipment that consumes too much energy
There are two different processes in the pre-treatment process of rice: wet and dry (strictly speaking, it is semi-dry, because the rice is crushed after soaking). Due to the wet process will lose 1% ~ 2% of rice raw materials, and the sewage treatment capacity is large, it is necessary to add sewage treatment equipment, so the number of production enterprises using dry process is increasing. In order to obtain the smallest possible rice starch granules in dry production, micro-pulverizers are commonly used. However, the total power of the micro grinder for the production of 3 tons of rice, including the supporting fans, feeders and air shut-offs, is about 70 kilowatts, and the power consumption per ton of rice is about 180 KWH, which is about four times the power consumption of wet production. In fact, before the advent of micro-pulverizers, non-micro-pulverized rice crushers have been used in dry production, which has a small power and can significantly reduce energy consumption. In fact, most straight strip powder manufacturers do not use micro pulverizers.

3)Pay attention to theoretical research, innovative drying technology to reduce energy consumption

At present, many manufacturers still use traditional positive pressure drying equipment, which significantly increases energy consumption. The so-called positive pressure drying means that the amount of air at room temperature is much greater than the amount of air discharged from the drying equipment, and positive pressure is formed inside the drying equipment, resulting in a large amount of hot air that still has a lot of drying potential energy running out. On the one hand, it increases energy consumption, on the other hand, it increases the temperature of the production workshop and reduces the comfort of the production environment. Therefore, the drying technology should be innovated, and the pressure drying should be changed to negative pressure drying, so as to achieve both energy saving and improve the production environment.

4.Innovate and optimize the supply of raw materials for production

The raw material for the production of noodles is not wheat but wheat flour, which is an important advantage of the simplicity of noodle production compared to rice flour production. If rice noodle production starts not with rice, but from rice flour, it will bring great benefits to rice noodle production enterprises. Manufacturers do not need to look around for rice with hard requirements for amylose, so as to reduce the cost of raw material procurement; There is no need for rice pretreatment and dehydration process, saving production land; Reduce the investment in the corresponding equipment; There is no sewage treatment problem caused by soaking rice, refining and dehydration, and a large amount of investment and land for sewage treatment equipment is saved; The quality requirements of raw materials are more guaranteed. Therefore, some rice flour production enterprises should be given birth to specialize in the production of various rice flours with different amylose content. Due to the high demand, the price of purchased rice will be slightly lower than that of rice flour production enterprises, and when it reaches a certain scale, a special rice farm can be attached. The price of rice flour is definitely higher than that of rice, and a reasonable balance will be found between the higher part and the benefits of rice flour production enterprises using rice flour as raw materials, so as to achieve benefits for both parties. In fact, rice flour production enterprises in United States, Canada, and France use rice flour instead of rice as raw materials, which is a new trend in the development of rice flour industry.

In general, the space for innovation is extremely broad, and relying on wisdom and hard work, we will be able to get out of the predicament to a certain extent and find a way out. Of course, innovation is a painstaking process, but there is a reward for paying.

Innovation is tough, but there is a way out; It is more difficult not to innovate, and the road ahead is boundless.