Strong smelling specialty
Liuzhou Bun Oc (Luosifen) is a typical street food in Liuzhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, southern China. This specialty has created a fever since famous vlogger Li Ziqi posted a cooking tutorial video a few years ago.
This thousand-year-old dish is made from rice noodles in a spicy broth flavored with river snails and served with ingredients such as pickled bamboo shoots, green beans, peanuts, and fried tofu skin.
The special feature is the rather unpleasant smell of the broth, made from pickled bamboo shoots and local spices. This is a dish that diners find unpleasant at first, but the more they eat, the more delicious it becomes.
Liuzhou, an industrial city famous for its steel and automobile industries, began producing “packaged bun oc” in 2014. Thanks to its strong promotion, the dish has created a huge industrial chain exporting packaged bun oc and recorded astonishing sales in recent years, according to Xinhua.
Since 2020, many famous bloggers have introduced this “extremely delicious” dish and it has quickly sold out on e-commerce platforms. The combination of online promotion and word of mouth has made bun oc a best-selling item in the Chinese culinary market.
In addition, the Liuzhou city government also organized a bun oc cooking program in 2020 to train professional chefs to prepare this dish. A “bun oc tourist town” has also been built in the suburbs of Liuzhou with annual bun oc festivals and competitions related to this famous dish.
In June 2021, Liuzhou dumplings were listed as a national intangible cultural heritage of China. The popularity of this dumpling dish has breathed new life into Liuzhou in particular and China's tourism industry in general.
Giant money printing machine
With the dual driving force of industrial production and online marketing, Liuzhou bun oc has become a famous dish throughout China in the short 3 years after the industrial production line was born.
The production of vermicelli noodles has become a booming industry in Liuzhou. Since 2017, the city has sold 900,000 packages of vermicelli noodles every day, with an output value of 3 billion yuan, according to CGTN.
The popularity of bun oc has breathed new life into Liuzhou. The city used to be economically dependent on the production of trucks and industrial cars. But now, many Liuzhou residents have entered the food business, opening bun oc shops or working in factories that package bun oc.
Liuzhou has a dedicated industrial park with dozens of bun oc factories and also contracts with enterprises to develop different bun oc recipes. From the initial 2 factories in 2014, the total number of enterprises in Liuzhou qualified to export bun oc has increased to 59.
Liuzhou dumplings are also exported to countries in North America, Europe, Australia... A representative of Guangxi Luobawang, one of the largest Liuzhou dumpling exporters, said that in early 2024, the company's export value had reached nearly 1 million USD.
According to Liuzhou Customs, the city exported more than 3,167 tons of instant noodles worth 87.27 million yuan ($12.16 million) in 2023, up 19.4 percent and 28.5 percent year-on-year, respectively, China Daily reported.
Official figures show that sales revenue of units engaged in the bun oc business in Liuzhou exceeded 54.5 billion yuan (about 7.48 billion US dollars) from January to September this year, up 12.08 percent year-on-year.
Meanwhile, bun oc exports brought in 63.2 million yuan in revenue for the city, up 2.9 percent year-on-year.
This prepackaged bun oc dish, described by many diners as “a premium version of instant noodles,” is one of the best-selling snacks on Chinese e-commerce sites.
