At the Second Precision Nutrition Industry Conference held in Harbin from August 21 to 23, a clear consensus emerged: the pathway from laboratory breakthroughs to market-ready products demands that scientific research institutions and industry partners work in lockstep from the very beginning, tackling challenges together and ultimately delivering technology to the production line.
The conference, hosted by the Precision Nutrition Industry Branch of the Chinese Nutrition Society and solely organized by Feihe, marked a significant milestone as the company unveiled its new raw material brand "Zhicheng," launched six protein raw materials, five premix products, and a series of new nutrition products for all life stages. Furthermore, Feihe formalized multiple strategic partnerships with leading nutrition and sports brands, officially entering the protein raw materials sector.
During the event, Pang Xiaoyang, a researcher at the Agricultural Products Processing Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and chief scientist of the Dairy Processing and Quality Control Innovation Team, shared his insights with reporters. He emphasized that amidst the accelerating breakthroughs in domestic milk protein raw materials and the urgent need to transition numerous laboratory technologies from research institutes to industrial mass production, a critical challenge faces the industry: how to overcome the gap between small-scale laboratory experiments and hundred-ton industrial production, transforming research findings on paper into tangible market products.
According to Pang, the core obstacles to successful technology transfer are twofold. First, industrial scale-up stability remains a major hurdle — techniques that yield excellent results in laboratory settings often encounter issues such as reduced purity, loss of activity, or batch-to-batch inconsistencies when scaled up to tens or hundreds of tons of industrial production, due to changes in temperature, timing, equipment, and material conditions. Second, there exists a disconnect between fundamental research and actual industry needs. Precision protein nutrition ultimately aims to address the nutritional requirements of specific populations, which demands not only proof of effectiveness in cellular or animal experiments, but also comprehensive evidence answering why it works, for whom it works, what dosage is effective, and whether it truly benefits human populations — establishing a complete evidence chain covering protein structure, physiological function, and human efficacy.
Highlighting Feihe's distinctive fresh milk protein extraction active process, Pang explained that its technical essence can be summarized in three words: low temperature, precision, and gentleness. The process directly uses fresh milk as raw material, separating various milk proteins and active components under mild conditions, with the primary objective of preserving their original structure and activity while extracting nutritional elements.
Drawing from the collaborative experience with Feihe, Pang emphasized that the most valuable aspect of such partnerships is the genuine combination of research institutions' technical strengths with enterprises' industrialization capabilities. Rather than handing completed research results to companies for upscaling, the most efficient technology transfer occurs when researchers and corporate engineers work together from project inception, jointly defining problems, co-developing solutions, and finally delivering the technology directly to the production line. This collaborative approach, embedded within Feihe's low-temperature, precise, and gentle processing philosophy, represents a viable path toward achieving self-reliance and control over critical milk protein raw materials in China's dairy industry.
The ultimate goal, as Pang articulated, is to genuinely master key milk protein raw materials through this synergistic model, bridging the gap between research innovation and industrial application, and ensuring that precision protein nutrition technologies effectively serve the health needs of specific populations across their full lifecycle.
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