To understand Mengniu, one must travel to northern China, to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, a region of cold steppes, enormous dairy farms, and a dairy tradition that dates back centuries. There, in 1999, a group of entrepreneurs who had worked at Yili (the other major Chinese dairy company) decided to forge their own path and founded a small UHT milk company. Those pioneers did not have a monumental industrial plan or state support: it was a private project that sought to take advantage of a profound change that the country was experiencing. At the end of the 90s, China was urbanizing at an unprecedented speed and millions of families were beginning to consume industrialized foods for the first time. Among these new habits, pasteurized and packaged milk was becoming a symbol of modernity and food safety. That concrete and measurable demographic change was what opened the door for Mengniu to grow. Twenty-five years later, that provincial SME has transformed into a private ...