On October 8th, the World Economic Forum announced a new batch of "Lighthouse Factories," and the Tsingtao Brewery, with a history of 121 years, successfully advanced to become a "Sustainable Lighthouse Factory" in the food and beverage industry.

It is widely believed in the industry that, from an overall economic perspective, an increasing number of "Lighthouse Factories" helps to accelerate the transformation of "Made in China" to "Smart Made in China." This is an important lever for promoting industrial transformation and speeding up the high-quality development of industries. After lighting up the industrial internet "Lighthouse Factory" in the beer and beverage industry, Tsingtao Beer once again set a green development benchmark for the global food and beverage industry. This is not only a high recognition of Tsingtao Beer's achievements in the field of digitalization and green transformation but also a vivid interpretation of how a century-old enterprise can maintain long-term competitiveness through technological innovation and sustainable development.

In the view of Zhu Danpeng, a food industry analyst in China, Lighthouse Factories provide a high standard for industry development, especially when the entire traditional industry in China is undergoing digital and intelligent transformation and upgrading. Tsingtao Beer's receipt of the "Sustainable Lighthouse Factory" honor is not only a high recognition of Tsingtao Beer's achievements in the field of digitalization and green transformation but also highlights how a century-old brand can adapt to the economic needs of the new era through innovative development. From the industry perspective, high-end and personalized products are also future trends. With the empowerment of digital and intelligent production, Tsingtao Beer can better exert brand effects, scale effects, and fan effects.

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Towards the "new": illuminating future consumption

At present, digital manufacturing is leading to more new changes in enterprises and industries, especially for factories in the food and beverage industry. Tsingtao Beer is based on the traditional industry of beer brewing, creating a new benchmark for factories that integrate production and consumption through technological innovation, project renewal, and consumer renewal.

In recent years, there has been room for structural upgrading in beer consumption, and the high-end development trend of the beer industry is obvious. As a production enterprise that has won the National Science and Technology Award four times in the brewing industry, Tsingtao Beer has a first-class platform of the National Key Laboratory in the brewing industry. It continuously iterates and upgrades the optimization of original categories such as classics and pure life, focusing more on the research and development of new and special products. It breaks through the limits of traditional beer alcohol content, flavor, and storage time, successfully leading the high-end development and structural upgrading of China's beer industry.

With the improvement of consumers' demand for the quality of alcohol consumption, Tsingtao Beer is also meeting the public's needs with continuous product structure upgrades, creating a product matrix of 9 categories and more than 70 products. Among them, the characteristics of advantage products such as classics, pure life, and white beer are more prominent; innovative products such as Augt A series whole wheat white beer, Pilsner, IPA, alcohol-free, and other new and special products add new consumption options. "Eternal Legend," "Century Journey," "Amber Lager," and other artistic brewing lead the high-end. The newly launched Tsingtao Beer fine original wort and crystal pure high-end fresh products meet consumers' new demands for high-end and fresh beer with the "fresh direct delivery" model.

According to Xing Lei, deputy director of the Tsingtao Beer Research Center, the team has accurately洞察ed consumers' demand for low and non-alcoholic beer drinks through big data of consumers, and has developed and brewed Tsingtao Beer 0.0% non-alcoholic beer, targeting beer enthusiasts who control alcohol intake but pursue taste.

As a typical representative of the beer industry, Tsingtao Beer has been exploring the forefront of the industry with a forward-looking vision and a broad perspective, promoting the process and scale of production application practices in the field of food fermentation enterprises. Previously, in response to the long breeding cycle, low efficiency, and poor targeting of food industry strain selection in China, Tsingtao Beer leveraged its technological accumulation and innovation advantages. For the first time, it deciphered the fine genetic map of industrial yeast, elucidated the industrial adaptability mechanism, and constructed a precise and efficient strain selection technology. It optimized existing strains and selected new strains with unique flavors, continuously deciphering the "chip" password of food biomanufacturing.

The breakthrough of these key technologies has enabled Tsingtao Beer to accelerate the formation of new quality production forces. Tsingtao Beer's precise and efficient yeast selection technology took the lead in breaking through the biological information of Chinese industrial lager yeast. It was the first to cultivate and plant hops in China, changing the dependence on imported hops and promoting the large-scale and modern development of the hop industry in Gansu and Xinjiang. In the field of low-carbon brewing, Tsingtao Beer has formed the integration and industrialization of 10 key technologies, promoting technological innovation in raw materials, packaging materials, equipment, and other industries, and driving the comprehensive energy consumption of the industry to reduce by more than 30%.In terms of creating new consumer scenarios, Tsingtao Beer has also achieved an understanding of new demands, keeping up with new trends, and leading new trends. From expanding from Qingdao to the whole country, new business forms such as the TSINGTAO1903 Tsingtao Beer Bar have created a unique beer-themed cultural and tourism ecosystem, activating urban memories with the vitality of beer, and also redefining the definition of the beer industry.

Towards "intelligence": Creating a flexible supply chain

Automation, digitalization, and intelligence can be said to be the most significant characteristics of the "lighthouse factory". Tsingtao Beer's exploration in digital transformation has laid the foundation for it to become a "lighthouse factory".

At present, the digitalization and intelligence transformation of China's traditional industries have achieved remarkable results, with the construction of demonstration factories, benchmark factories, and lighthouse factories progressing steadily, and world-class advanced manufacturing enterprises continue to emerge. Since 2018, the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Consulting have launched the "Lighthouse Factory" project globally to find models of digital transformation in the manufacturing industry. To date, 90 factories from 22 industries worldwide have been selected, including 31 "lighthouse factories" in China. These "lighthouse factories" are widely distributed in various fields such as consumer goods, automobiles, and home appliances, actively exploring their own digitalization paths, and showing the huge potential of traditional industries in digital transformation.

How to use new technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, such as automation, industrial internet, cloud computing, big data, and 5G, to achieve comprehensive transformation in business models, product development models, production models, quality management models, and consumer service models, and to promote efficiency improvement, energy saving and emission reduction, and business optimization, is also a question that Tsingtao Beer has been thinking about.

In recent years, Tsingtao Beer has redeployed intelligent digital technology on the value chain, reducing the delivery time of customer orders and the development time of new products by 50%, continuously improving production efficiency, and was awarded the "Lighthouse Factory" of the beer and beverage industry in 2021.

Behind the intelligent production line, personalized customization, and brand rejuvenation is the advantage of this lighthouse in playing its flexible supply chain. By introducing technologies such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis on a large scale, Tsingtao Beer has built a full-chain, end-to-end digital ecosystem in the links of customer demand, supply chain balance, material procurement, production processing, logistics distribution, channel management, and customer touch. At the same time, with the domestic consumer market's demand for beer consumption showing a trend of diversification, personalization, and scenarioization, Tsingtao Beer Factory can drive based on user needs and provide personalized and customized products for consumers.

This digital innovation has made Tsingtao Beer more capable of dealing with rapidly changing markets. Just as the "New Growth Theory" pointed out by Nobel Prize winner in Economics Paul Romer, technological progress is the core driving force of economic growth. Tsingtao Beer has improved production efficiency through intelligent manufacturing technology and can reduce resource waste, forming a production model driven by technology. This transformation has not only created more added value for the enterprise but also provided a successful example for the digital upgrade of the entire industry.

Towards "green": Practicing sustainable development

If the "lighthouse factory" is a "digital manufacturing" and "Globalization 4.0" demonstrator with exemplary significance, then the "sustainable lighthouse factory" is the "lighthouse among lighthouses". From the certification results, those certified as sustainable lighthouse factories mainly improve the management efficiency and usage efficiency of raw materials, energy, or waste through technical means, and the change range is usually 30%-70% of the baseline."This year, companies awarded the 'Sustainable Lighthouse' title have played their role as global benchmarks for operational excellence by leading the industry in reducing carbon emissions and making progress in promoting a circular economy," said the World Economic Forum. The selected companies have continuously improved the industry's ability to respond to future risks by enhancing resilience, agility, and environmental awareness.

Being recognized as a "Sustainable Lighthouse Factory" signifies that Tsingtao Beer is a "green pacesetter" in using advanced technology to reduce environmental impact. Tsingtao Beer was the first in the industry to use "lightweight bottles" and pioneered the creation of a wastewater value-sharing project in China. It has established a new model of circular economy that synergizes pollution reduction and carbon emission reduction along the upstream and downstream supply chain, leading the industry towards low-carbon development. Currently, Tsingtao Beer has 22 green factories across the country, ranking at the forefront of the industry. Moreover, Tsingtao Beer has driven the green transformation and upgrading of the entire supply chain, including glass bottles, cans, and cardboard boxes, by adopting low-carbon packaging materials and utilizing low-carbon transportation methods.

The century-old factory continues to upgrade. As a traditional manufacturing enterprise with brewing at its core, Tsingtao Beer has further enhanced the integration of industrial internet and IoT technologies, deploying 25 use cases that effectively break production bottlenecks and further improve the comprehensive benefits in terms of resources, energy consumption, and ecological dimensions, reducing energy consumption and carbon intensity in beer production.

Behind Tsingtao Beer's advancement as a "Sustainable Lighthouse Factory" lies its forward-looking planning to lead industry transformation through green production and its practical actions to create a sustainable and responsible value chain and industrial ecosystem. This provides valuable wisdom and pathways for traditional industries to achieve high-quality development in a green and low-carbon manner.

This green transformation not only meets the current global requirements for low-carbon economic development but also aligns with consumers' demands for environmentally friendly and sustainable products. Economist William Nordhaus's "Climate Economics" model indicates that future economic growth must be based on environmental protection, and companies' green production models will play a key role in this process. By reducing its carbon footprint and resource consumption in production, Tsingtao Beer demonstrates how traditional manufacturing can achieve sustainable growth against the backdrop of global climate change.

Tsingtao Beer has not only set a new industry benchmark in intelligent manufacturing and environmentally friendly production but also provided valuable experience for traditional manufacturing on how to face future digital and low-carbon challenges. With a dual-wheel drive strategy, Tsingtao Beer, with its century-old accumulation, is once again leading the direction of industry development. In the future, it will also further accelerate as a pioneer towards "new," "intelligence," and "green," moving towards high-quality development.