HOHHOT, Aug. 11 (Xinhua) -- The scent of warm milk drifted through the Haan Idee Dairy Food Factory as Tao Gao dipped a wooden ladle into a copper vat.
Each slow swirl echoed a gesture her ancestors repeated some eight centuries ago on this same grassland, and yet the products about to roll off the production line were anything but ancient, comprising cheese crisps in snack-size pouches, fruit-studded milk skins and instant coffee-like milk tea powder.
The foundation of the factory's new creation is Tsagaan Idee, which translates literally as white food, the umbrella term for Mongolia's dairy canon. In the 13th century, herders in Zhenglan Banner, home to Xanadu, one of the two major capitals of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), sent wagons of hand-churned butter and air-dried cheese to the imperial kitchens.
Today, the descendants of those ancient herding families in Zhenglan Banner, Xilingol League, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, are live-streaming their dairy products to millions of viewers on social media platforms like Douyin, enticing orders from far and wide.
Inside the factory, a repurposed sunflower-seed roaster now kneads 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of milk a day into elastic curd without requiring manual stirring. It is an improvised solution that lets Tao, Inner Mongolia's sole national-level inheritor of Tsagaan Idee craft, scale up while keeping the taste unchanged.
"People outside the Inner Mongolian pastoral areas do not have the habit of eating dairy products or drinking milk tea, so to make more people accept Inner Mongolian dairy products, we have to innovate," Tao explained. She often takes her dairy products to large exhibitions, such as the Canton Fair held in south China's Guangdong Province, to promote the taste of the grasslands.
A wide variety of new products based on traditional Mongolian dairy products, including mooncakes filled with dairy tofu, cheese pizzas and whey drinks, have been packaged in fashionable designs and sold nationwide through internet sales.
This road of novel attempts also features 118 small hand-craft studios and eight licensed industrial plants -- whose combined innovation efforts are turning Zhenglan Banner into a quality dairy chain. The result is 163 registered trademarks and a catalog that now includes sweetened "Old Zhenglan Banner" yogurt bricks and ready-to-drink liquid Mongolian milk tea, sold as far south as central China's Henan Province.
Haan Idee is also now collaborating with the region's leading family dining brand Xibei to supply what is known as milk skin to some of its outlets in Beijing, said Tao. In Inner Mongolia's pastoral households, milk skin is the time-honored name for a handmade treat -- milk that is gently heated until its butterfat rises and fuses with the protein film on the surface, yielding a creamy sheet with a delicate membrane on each side and a rich layer of fat in between.
Today, Inner Mongolia's traditional milk skin, now refined with modern food technology and contemporary flavors, has become part of milk-skin yogurt that Chinese Gen-Z often queue for. This dessert, made by combining milk skin formed from heated milk with yogurt, has become a viral sensation since the beginning of 2024. Its appeal lies in the slightly yellow, creamy milk skin that tops the yogurt, adding a rich and smooth texture.
Bizhenniu, an Inner Mongolia-based company, now tailors traditional dairy products into customized yogurt solutions for commercial clients from bubble-tea chains to high-end restaurants.
From court tribute to trending hashtag, the grasslands' "white food" has found a new lease on life. With demand outpacing supply, hand-stirring can no longer keep up. Tao Gao currently sells more than 2 million yuan (about 278,600 U.S. dollars) worth of products every year.
Notably, specialization, marketization and branding have become the development trends for traditional Inner Mongolian dairy products. Under the guidance of local authorities, herdsmen are combining ancestral skills with modern consumer needs, helping traditional dairy products captivate modern palates via a touch of innovation.
Inner Mongolia produced more than 7.76 million tonnes of milk in 2024, accounting for 19 percent of China's total output and topping the national rankings for the seventh consecutive year.
While much of the dairy food production still comes from family workshops, industrial-scale production is on the rise. Suutai Tsai, a traditional Mongolian salty milk tea, has been bottled as "Urij" liquid tea and hit local markets in Henan and northeast China's Liaoning Province.
Anchored in Inner Mongolia for research and development and raw material supplies, the bottled Mongolian milk tea has its production hub located in east China's Shandong Province, e-commerce centers in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, and Zhengzhou, capital of Henan. An integrated modern layout is propelling Mongolian dairy products onto a bigger stage stretching outside its traditional heartland. ■
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