In the context of market economic development and in-depth integration, competition is inevitable, which makes product quality one of the most crucial factors in helping an enterprise’s product and brand stand firm and develop in the market. Aware of this, given 50 years of development, Sa Giang Import Export Corporation (SAGIMEXCO) has continuously invested to improve product quality, regarded consumers’ health as the core of development, and has gained success.
SAGIMEXCO’s precursor was Sa Giang Prawn Cracker Plant founded in 1960. Director General Pham Huu Qua of SAGIMEXCO said that “Since the 1970s, Sa Giang Prawn Crackers has been a well-known brand in the market and gained Silver Medal in OSAKA Japan Trade Fair in 1970. At that time, France was the key import market and before 1975, Sa Giang Prawn Cracker brand was favoured by domestic consumers.”
Sa Giang has been active in asserting their product and brand reputation. Their products have always met food hygiene standards, found stable consuming markets and continuously expanded.
Mr Pham Huu Qua shared that Europe is currently the key market of Sa Giang. Despite its being large and considered demanding with technical barriers, with good development policy, the company still satisfies this challenging market. At present, the corporation’s products are mainly sold in the countries such as Britain, France, Germany, Holland and others like Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Egypt, Czech Republic, United States, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Morocco, etc.
Concerning Sa Giang product quality, previously, application of HACCP in food processing was quite new and unfamiliar for Sa Giang. However, fully aware of the product quality issue, Sa Giang quickly invested and successfully adopted quality control management programme under HACCP to meet Europe’s strict food hygiene requirements on products for export to the EU market. This effort then blossomed when Sa Giang became one of the 18 first Vietnamese enterprises issued CODE for export to Europe in 1997.
Given such success, in the following years, Sa Giang has expanded its markets, innovated designs and improved product quality. Thus, the reputation of Sa Giang Prawn Crackers has spread domestically and in foreign markets such as Britain, France, United States, Japan, and South Korea.
To meet growing export demand, in 1999, the Corporation completed and put into operation a prawn cracker manufacturing plant with annual productivity of 800 tonnes and fund of VND 3 billion from its own budget (which is now Sa Giang 2 Prawn Cracker Factory). In June 2003, the Corporation put into operation another prawn cracker manufacturing plant with annual productivity of 2,500 tonnes and fund of VND 17 billion (which is now Sa Giang 1 Prawn Cracker Factory).
Apart from quality improvement and food hygiene, Sa Giang has also paid attention to product diversification. At the moment, Sa Giang has varied products made from fishery, meat, wheat flour, rice flour such as prawn cracker, crab, fish, cuttle-fish chips, special prawn, noodle, rice spaghetti, dried papaya, wine, pork in pe bag, pork and pork head in pe bag, ham covered in skin, dried price fish, instant dried spice pork, etc. The Corporation’s technical workers are continuing to study new products, how to improve quality and design to fulfil customers’ various demands.
Huong Giang
Vietnamese
