Small Dumplings Lead to a Big World
--- Red Capitalists, Jan. 4, 2005

Founded in 1996, Jiangsu Da Niang Dumpling Co. Ltd ((DND) started from a small restaurant of 30 square meters with 6 workers in a corner of Changzhou Commercial Plaza. Dumpling was not the staple food served in the restaurant at that time. Wu Guoqiang, the boss, recalled that the daily sales volume of the restaurant was only 230 Yuan, with a monthly loss of 15,000 yuan.
Wu Guoqiang, once working as a government employee and journalist, didn’t lose heart. He calmed down and thought hard. He was clear that the catering industry in China had already entered into a stage of mass consumption, but where his opportunity was lying? His life experience in Qinghai Province after graduation from college often occurred to him. At that time, he was a member of Qinghai Provincial Writers’ Union. Every time, when he went back home travel-stained and exhausted, the neighboring grandma would invite him to have a bowl of steaming home-made dumplings which could always arouse his good appetite and help him to recover from homesickness.
Wu Guoqiang made a prompt decision. With careful preparations, on May 8, 1996, he started his business of dumplings in his small restaurant. A retired grandma from the Northeast China was invited to wrap the dumplings, while he himself mixed the filling. All the dumplings wrapped on the first day were sold out and from then on, his business began to prosper.
Since the take-away market of fast-food in Changzhou was already quite developed, Wu Guoqiang soon set up his Da Niang Dumpling (DND) take-away restaurant. With the rising reputation of DND, he collected a cash flow of 100,000 Yuan and set up on January 1 his DND restaurant in Changzhou Commercial Plaza. This restaurant indicated the beginning of the primitive accumulation of DND which not only enabled Wu Guoqiang to pay off all the debts but also made it possible to open chain restaurants.
In 1998, Wu Guo picked up his courage to go out of Changzhou and successfully opened his DND restaurant in Shilu of Suzhou. In the following year, DND advanced to Nantong and Wuxi. Seven chain restaurants were opened and all of them won big success. In 1999, the renovation of the pedestrian mall of Nanjing Road in Shanghai was completed and the billboard of DND was put up in this street which is known to the world as “No. 1 Commercial Street in China”. As the first Jiangsu catering company settled down in Nanjing Road, the opening of the DND restaurant was quite a hit in Shanghai.
Now, the number of DND restaurants has exceeded 100. As a famous brand in the fast-food industry in China, DND restaurants have spread all over Shanghai and Jiangsu, and settled down in Hefei, Wuhu, Beijing, Qingdao, and even in Indonesia.