Zhenmei

Zhenmei traces to a grocery stall opened in 1945 in Jiangdong, Chao'an, selling pork products, bean curd and meatballs — a classic case of a Chaoshan food house that began at a rural market.

Handed down and refined across generations, Zhenmei grew from a grocery into a modern snack-food company, best known for its dried meat (rou fu) and counted among China's better-known producers of it. It was named a third-batch Chinese Time-Honored Brand in 2024.

Chaoshan dried meat and meatballs reward careful sourcing and handwork: meatballs are pounded repeatedly until the paste turns springy and resilient, while dried meat is thinly sliced, seasoned and grilled. Zhenmei layered modern processing onto these techniques to preserve the local taste at scale.

It is a third-batch Chinese Time-Honored Brand.