World Pork Day
From 2026 year 10 month 22 to 24, the 2026 World Pork Festival and International Pork and Pork Products Exhibition was held at the Central China International Exhibition Center in Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone. The world’s first all-sector carnival themed around “pork” was held concurrently with the fifteenth Li Mann China Swine Industry Conference and the fifteenth World Swine Industry Expo, together forming a full pork-industry-chain event comprising “one conference, one exhibition, and one festival.”
The scale and scope of this major event are themselves the most direct reflection of the times in China’s pig industry: the exhibition covers 10 ten thousand square meters and brings together more than 800 domestic and international companies, including Muyuan, CP Group, Huayu, Sanquan, Yangxiang, Kaixue, and Yutong. The conference has over ten thousand delegates, with 16.2 ten thousand professional visitor attendances. Companies and professional visitors from more than 20 countries and regions around the world attend in organized groups.
As the country’s largest province for pig farming, Henan has elevated an industry exhibition into an annual event spanning the entire industry chain and connecting production with consumption. Through this event, we can see several clear and profound changes taking place in China’s pig industry.
01 From “farming” to the “whole chain”: industry competition shifts to the entire industrial chain
The most notable feature of this edition of the Pork Festival is that it is no longer a “gathering of pig farmers,” but an industry map connecting the entire value chain. The upstream segment covers breeding pig production, veterinary drugs and vaccines, and feed nutrition; the midstream segment focuses on smart livestock farming equipment, environmental control, and environmental treatment for livestock farming; and the downstream segment extends to in-depth meat processing, cold-chain logistics, and other areas, bringing together the entire swine industry value chain for display.
Muyuan Foods Group’s booth is a particularly representative example. It focuses on showcasing the closed-loop process across the entire “breeding, feed, farming, slaughtering, and food safety” chain to professional buyers, while collaborating with partners such as Sanquan and Synear to showcase the ecosystem of end products. For general consumers, it offers interactive experiences such as tastings and photo opportunities along the entire industry chain, explaining how good meat is produced through a “taste first, understand later” approach.
This sends a clear signal: competition at individual stages is outdated. The core competitive advantage of the future lies in connecting “breeding, feed, farming, slaughter, processing, and sales” into a closed loop. Breeding companies are expanding into slaughtering and processing; slaughtering and processing companies are moving upstream into breeding and traceability; and food companies are taking control of raw material supplies. Coordination across the entire industry chain is becoming the common choice of leading players in the sector.
02 Technology-driven: Smart Aquaculture Moves from Concept to Implementation
Intelligent and digital technologies are among the highlights of this exhibition. A series of smart-farming “cutting-edge technologies,” including AI pig-farm inspection robots, intelligent feeding systems, needle-free immunization injection devices, and pig herd health sound recognition and early warning systems, made a concentrated debut, turning the “smart pig farm” from an idea into deliverable products.
These technologies directly address two major pain points in the aquaculture industry:
First, reduce costs and improve efficiency by lowering the feed-to-meat ratio and reducing reliance on labor through precision feeding and intelligent environmental control.
Second, biosecurity: inspection robots and sound recognition provide early warnings, helping detect disease risks early and contain them at the source. Since African swine fever, biosecurity has become a lifeline for livestock farming enterprises, and intelligent technology is the most powerful tool for protecting it.
Meanwhile, the Agriculture, Animal Husbandry and Cold Chain Logistics Forum focused on refined operations, digital management and control, and the transition to new energy equipment. Companies including Muyuan Logistics, Shuanghui Logistics and CATL took part in discussions, showing that the digitalization and greening of cold chain logistics have become another key link in reducing costs and improving efficiency across the entire industry chain.
03 Branding and Consumption: From "Selling Pork" to "Selling a Brand"
This World Pork Festival took “Developing Pork Brands and Boosting Pork Consumption” as its theme, placing brands and consumption at the heart of industry development. This is a meaningful shift—the focus of China’s pig industry is moving from production to consumption.
At the International Pork Development Forum, experts and representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, China Agricultural University, McKinsey, Muyuan, Cargill, and the Canadian Meat Council analyzed new opportunities in Chinese pork consumption, breeding and meat quality improvement, global trade patterns, and consumer comparisons between China and Europe.
This points to a consensus: as consumption upgrades, the value of pork is no longer determined solely by "weight" but jointly by "quality," "flavor," "safety," and "brand." The fact that breeding and meat quality improvement have been listed as a separate topic shows that "good pigs produce good meat, and good meat depends on breeding" is becoming a new focus of competition in the industry.
This edition of the Pork Festival also featured five core areas: food, culture, music, consumer experiences, and procurement. More than 50 special activities took place in succession, including a tasting of famous pork dishes from across the country, a pork innovation cooking competition, a whole-pig banquet tasting, a pork culture gallery, and piglet races. These activities vividly connected the value chain from production to consumption. Bringing pork culture to the public and helping consumers appreciate quality pork is, in essence, a way to instill emotion and trust in pork consumption—the underlying logic of branding.
04 Where is China’s pig industry headed?
Several directional judgments about the industry's development can be drawn from the signals sent by this edition of the World Pork Expo.
First, an integrated industry chain and branding are inevitable directions. Breeding, slaughtering, or processing alone can hardly build barriers to entry. Only a closed-loop, end-to-end chain from breeding to end products, combined with a brand that consumers can recognize and are willing to pay a premium for, provides a foundation for weathering the hog cycle and achieving high-quality development.
Second, technology and safety provide a foundation for ongoing investment. Smart pig farming, biosecurity, and cold chain digitalization—these “invisible investments” are becoming decisive factors in cost and quality, and will also be an important dividing line in the industry.
Third, shifting from production-oriented to consumption-oriented. The festival- and carnival-style initiatives themed around “developing pork brands and boosting pork consumption” show that the industry is beginning to proactively engage consumers and build cultural affinity. The better a company understands consumers, the more likely it is to stand out in homogeneous competition.
The first World Pork Festival has come to a close, but the door it opened to upgrading China’s pig industry has only just begun to open. The shift from a “major pig-farming country” to a “strong pig-farming country,” and from “selling pork” to “selling brands,” means this event was not only an annual review but also a starting gun for China’s pig industry as it enters a new stage of high-quality development.
Lei Yonghui
Young Agribusiness Founders
Founder of Si Bian Business Studies
World Pork Festival Chief Consultant