In 1999 Berry Ltd of the UK and Flying Dragon Ltd of Qingdao, China incorporated a joint venture in China's "market garden" province - Shandong. The name of this joint venture is Dragons Garden. The founders are both trading companies with much experience sourcing raw materials for the food industry. The founding vision for Dragons Garden was to introduce new varieties of soft fruits to Shandong province. From the outset it was the intenion that a major part of the production capacity would be organic.

Dragons Garden's first property was at Hong Dao (red island) a peninsula jutting into Qingdao Bay. This site was perfect to get the experimentation underway, and still acts as Dragons Garden's nursery. A further farm at Hetao was soon also acquired. All these two blocks started for organic operation.

It was quickly realised that being able to offer a complete service - from growing to final packing - would be a great strength, and therefore a processing facility was sought as a focal point around which to expand the planting programme. In the last part of 2002 a lease was taken out on a disused factory at Yifengdian village near Jimo City, about 1 hour from Qingdao. In 2003 after extensive refurbishment the packing of a range of soft fruits and tree fruits began at the Yifengdian factory. Our factory has an IQF line and blast freezing chambers along with slicing, dicing and puree making facilities. We have ISO9001 and HACCP system to guarantee security and safety of our products. Further refurbishment will be made in early spring of 2007 to enlarge our capacity for frozen items and set up new lines for dried items and jams.

Whilst the factory was being refurbished moves were also being made to expand the growing base. Dragons Garden was able to take control of two further farms, and immediately set them on the path to organic certification. In 2005 one of these farms completed it's conversion period and is now fully organic, the other is still in conversion and will be fully organic from 2007.We now have 75 acres of own organic farms which were EU,NOP and JAS certified by Ecocert.

At Dragons Garden we are delighted to have achieved our aim of becoming a trusted supplier of organic and conventional products to customers on every continent. This success has in a large part been due to the hard work and dedication of our management team.