As S. Koreans eat less rice, CJ looks overseas to grow Hetbahn

JINCHEON: For three decades, CJ CheilJedang has honed a seemingly simple recipe for instant rice under its Hetbahn brand, which more often than not stands in for microwavable rice itself in South Korea.

The nation’s first aseptic-packaged cooked rice, debuted in 1996, now holds about 65% of the domestic market and has grown into a lineup of multigrain bowls, pot-cooked rice, porridge, cup meals and even rice-studded gelato.

Innovation continues at CJ’s smart factory in Jincheon, North Chung-cheong Province, where the company keeps pace with evolving palates at home and an overseas customer base that now accounts for a rising share of sales.

CJ Blossom Campus in Jincheon is South Korea’s largest processed food plant, where automation runs through most of the Hetbahn operation, from manufacturing and packaging to warehousing and underground rail transport.

One of Hetbahn’s two plants in South Korea, the campus turns out about 280 million bowls a year on six lines.

The Busan plant lifts annual output to about 700 million. At the heart of both plants sits aseptic technology, which lets Hetbahn keep for nine months at room temperature without preservatives.

CJ imported its original aseptic line from Japan in 1996 and has kept improving it on its own.

“We brought in the same line and the same equipment, but our know-how has refined it so much that you can hardly call it the same equipment our competitors use,” Oh Ye-jin, food research and development master at CJ CheilJedang, said last Wednesday.

“This aseptic process remains a production technology rivals cannot match.”

The company said Hetbahn holds 267 patents, which carried it from white rice into multigrain, pot-cooked rice and sticky rice for global markets.

Its pot-cooked line, for one, uses vacuum-pressure sterilisation to seal in toppings, and optimised moisture and heat treatment to keep their texture.

Those patents run through a production chain that begins at harvest, when CJ researchers check moisture in freshly thre-shed grain nationwide.

At the plant, each bowl starts with grain milled that morning.

“CJ is the only rice maker in South Korea with its own milling system.

“To cook rice at its freshest point, we make same-day milling a rule,” Oh said.

Production then follows eight steps: washing, soaking, filling, steam sterilisation, adding water, cooking, clean-room sealing and inspection.

To block spoilage-causing microbes, CJ runs a clean room that it likens to a semiconductor facility, with fewer than 100 dust particles per sq ft against about 20,000 in ordinary air.

Multilayer packaging then shuts out oxygen and withstands impact.

With freshness secured, the next frontier is what to make of the grain itself.

Hetbahn’s research and development has expanded from grain blending into a nutrition design that adds protein and fibre and, through reconstituted rice, cuts carbohydrates and calories.

CJ aims to lift Hetbahn’s annual sales to the 1.5 trillion won (US$1.13bil) range by 2028, up from a record of more than 1.1 trillion won last year. — The Korea Herald/ANN