To avoid chaos, Xiao Yu arranged for every port area in Qingyang Prefecture to have a government purchase point that only bought dried goods. As for the seafood sauces, to ensure hygiene, Xiao Yu planned to open her own factory.
The first designated location was set up in Qingyang Port, the closest to Qingyang Prefecture. They bought a piece of land there to build the factory. Being seaside, it needed a windbreak wall made of stone, and the buildings inside were to be constructed of wood or adobe. That was the best they could do with the current conditions, and it was not sensible to ask for more.
The easiest products to make were kelp, nori, and seaweed because they required a large area for drying. Therefore, the center of the land they bought, which was also the center of the factory, became the drying base. Fortunately, the marine goods they collected were mostly dry, and their job was to package them neatly, sorting them into categories. If there were any items not yet dried, they had to be selected and left to dry further to prevent mold and spoilage.
Then there were the baked squid strips and fish fillets. These could only be sold locally for fear of spoilage if transported too far. Therefore, they would be sold within Qingyang Prefecture.
The dried scallops and snail meat could be sent to Beijing and other regions of Yan Country since they were already dried.
Abalone and sea cucumber also required drying. If the products collected were already dried, that was best; if they were fresh, the processing factory had to reprocess them.
In short, due to preservation issues, many opportunities were lost in the seafood business. For example, with crabs, you either made drunken crab or crab sauce. To sell fresh crabs, besides having large ships, you also needed the right storage conditions. To avoid loss, Xiao Yu could only deal with some basic marine products since the business was just starting.
After repeated research, she invented Crab Yellow Oil Crab Powder, crab paste, and crab meat, giving abundant crabs the chance to be sold beyond Qingyang Prefecture. Get full chapters from NoveI-Fire.ɴet
Additionally, she set up an oyster processing base, primarily to make oyster sauce. Every winter, when oysters were abundant, it took workers all day to shuck them. The clean oysters were then placed in large pots for processing into oyster sauce.
Since processing oysters required starch, which meant sweet potatoes and potatoes, they could only procure potatoes at the moment. Sweet potatoes could only be planted in the spring of the next year. However, Beijing had already experimented for a year and produced a fair amount of starch, perfectly supplementing what the restaurants routinely needed.
Perhaps things were a bit chaotic at first, a bit disoriented, flailing east and west, but Xiao Yu and Yan Qing were both doing their utmost to perfect these business chains, striving to achieve, from field to seafood processing, from processing to earning buckets of gold daily, the ability to ensure the fishermen by the sea could live a prosperous life.
It took the couple three years to perfectly integrate this business chain. To achieve this, they did not even have time to consider having children.
Yan Qing was not without complaints about this, but each time Shen Xiaoyu’s sweet talk and tender assaults defeated him.
Finally, after three years, when high-yield crops such as wheat, sweet potatoes, corn, and rice were spread all over Qingyang Prefecture and the seafood processing factories in various places were operating smoothly, the couple finally succeeded in creating life.