Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, which is renowned for spicy hotpot, has intensified its efforts to promote the industry's digital transformation.
According to the Chongqing Municipal Commission of Commerce, the city has strived to achieve an output value of 500 billion yuan (about 69.77 billion U.S. dollars) from the hotpot industry by 2027 and become the world's hotpot capital by 2035.
As of 2023, Chongqing had already had more than 36,000 hotpot restaurants, with an industrial chain output value of more than 300 billion yuan. The booming hotpot consumption and the city's digital development efforts promote the sector's intelligent upgrading.
An industrial cluster has formed in the city's Hechuan District, bringing about manufacturers of hotpot ingredients and broth.
In recent interviews with the China Global Television Network (CGTN), company representatives said they have integrated technlogy into their production and research and development processes to offer products of higher quality to consumers.
"We are the first enterprise in China to standardize and modernize the production of hotpot butter. As an industry pioneer with a 40-year history, we have been working on the intelligent upgrade for our equipment in recent years, to improve the quality of the hotpot butter, as well as efficiency,”said Zhou Keyu, general manager of Chongqing Muge Food.
"In these tubes are the various hotpot soup base, and we're now testing for the optimal concentration of salt. Our testing center's purpose is to establish standards for the quality and taste of hotpot broth via more scientific methods,” said Wang Wei, supervisor of the inspection and testing center at Chongqing Mei Xiang Group.
"Since 2000, our hotpot seasoning compound production has gradually dived into today's, fully intelligent and unmanned era. We can provide customers with customized food ingredients from the source, such as different types of new chilies, Sichuan peppers and so on. We will also use our big data platform for whole-chain monitoring,” said Liu Fangjun, a representative of Chongqing Mei Xiang Group.
China's Chongqing steps up efforts to promote digital transformation of hotpot industry
China's scientific expedition team on Thursday obtained critical ice cores during their investigation of the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, which is known as Asia's "water tower".
The region encompasses "one glacier, two lakes and three rivers". It is home to Purog Kangri Glacier, the world's largest glacier in the mid to low-latitude regions, as well as Siling Lake and Namtso Lake, the largest and second-largest lakes in Xizang, respectively. It is also the birthplace of the Yangtze River, Nujiang River and Yarlung Zangbo River.
The climate in the region is complex and changeable, and its ecosystem is very fragile, and meanwhile it is a pivotal area for Xizang's economic and social development.
During their expedition, the team drilled for ice cores at different depths overnight on Thursday, aiming to capture climate records from different time scales.
Ice core drilling is typically conducted during the night and early morning when the ice temperature is sufficiently low.
Ice cores serve as vital records of global climate and environmental changes. The sediments and bubbles within these cores are clues to understanding the history of Earth's climate. By studying the bubbles captured in ice cores, scientists can analyze atmospheric composition, including carbon dioxide levels, over hundreds of thousands of years.
Yao Tandong, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and leader of the expedition, and Lonnie Thompson, a renowned American glacier expert and foreign academician at CAS, conducted their scientific expedition on the glacier Thursday morning.
Through helicopter observations, thickness-measuring radar, satellite image comparison and other methods, the scientific expedition team has found that the surface area of the Purog Kangri Glacier has shrunk by 10 percent over the past 50 years.
The average altitude of Purog Kangri Glacier is 5,748 meters, with the highest point reaching 6,370 meters. Due to global warming, the glacier is melting rapidly.
"So does the melting of glacier surface -- the higher the altitudes, the less the ablation volume, while at lower altitudes, it accumulates and forms branch-like rivers on the ice surface. Currently, these branches extend up to altitudes of 6,000 meters," said Xu Baiqing, a research fellow of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research under the CAS.
Research indicates that the accelerated retreat of glaciers on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau over the past 40 years reflects a broader trend, and the melting rate of the Purog Kangri Glacier is relatively slow compared to the overall situation of the plateau.
The temperature changes within the glacier also attributed to the great difficulty of drilling, said Xu.
"Due to climate warming, the temperature within the glacier has risen, which suggests that under the same backdrop of temperature variations, the ablation may show abrupt shift with accelerating growth," said Xu.
The expedition was launched on Aug 18, 2024 and is scheduled to continue until October.
Scientists obtain critical ice cores during expedition in Qinghai-Xizang Plateau
