Hong Kong Originals: From border farms to industrial kitchens, bringing locally made radish cakes for Spring Festival

Silence usually blankets the industrial buildings of Kwun Tong on weekends. But on one Sunday morning in early February, a factory unit was buzzing with chatter and rapid chops.

Inside the cramped 10th-floor kitchen, production was in full swing, with the sweet scent of radish filling the air. Workers were busy peeling and cutting the root vegetables that were harvested from a farm in Yuen Long less than 24 hours earlier.

“The lead-up to Lunar New Year is our busiest time,” Nicola Yim, co-founder of Blue Drop Kitchen, told HKFP in Cantonese. “We don’t normally work on Sundays.”

Founded in 2021, Blue Drop Kitchen is a boutique food brand that sources ingredients from local farms. Its flagship product for the festive season is radish cake, a savoury Spring Festival delicacy made with shredded radish, rice flour, and preserved meats.

Radish cakes are ubiquitous this time of year, with many restaurant chains, bakery groups, and hotels selling their own iterations of the classic dish.

What sets theirs apart from others, Yim said, is their partnership with local farmers and the high radish-to-rice flour ratio.

“Our radish cakes are 80 per cent radish. Other radish cakes elsewhere may only be one-third radish,” she said.

This is why their products have a shorter shelf life, she added. “When there’s more radish, it will go bad quicker because radish releases water over time.”

Ben Tso, Blue Drop Kitchen’s other co-founder, said they serve not the mass market, but a niche one willing to pay more for quality.

The price of Blue Drop Kitchen’s radish cakes rivals that of Michelin-rated restaurants at some five-star hotels.

Using only Hong Kong-grown radish is not cheap, especially compared with getting it from mainland China. Still, Yim and Tso see no room for compromise as sourcing local sits at the heart of their mission.

They also do not negotiate costs with farmers, believing the prices they offer are reasonable and reflect their labour and expenses.

“Every farm’s cost is different. The fertilisers and the seeds they use would all be different,” Yim said. “We will not ask them to lower their prices for us.”

Warming climate

Further north, away from the industrial bustle of Kwun Tong, Shirley Chau and Yip Tsz-shing were wrapping up their radish-growing season.

The couple run O-Farm, located not far from Sha Tau Kok – a border town in North District, near Shenzhen – where they planted around 3,500 catties of radish in late November to ensure a harvest in time for Lunar New Year.

“We estimate 30 per cent of it might not be usable because of pests or other reasons,” Chau told HKFP in early February. “We always plant more as a buffer.”

Since 2021, the couple have been supplying their produce to local radish cake manufacturers, including Blue Drop Kitchen.

The radish they are growing is known as “white jade spring,” a South Korean variety, although the seeds are imported from mainland China.

“This variety is known for being more uniformly shaped, sweeter, and having less of a sharp bite,” Yip said.

White jade spring radish is also more resistant, an important characteristic as climate change makes Hong Kong’s weather increasingly unpredictable.

Yip, who has around 30 years of farming experience, has witnessed the warming climate affect farmers. Some crops, like romaine lettuce and iceberg lettuce, can no longer grow effectively in Hong Kong as it is too hot, he said.

Radishes are hardier, but not immune to rising temperatures. When the weather is hotter, radish takes less time to harvest, forcing farmers to calibrate their harvest schedules carefully.

“Farmers said in the past, maybe 20 years ago, that radish takes 90 days to grow,” he said. “Now, I think it’s closer to 75 days.”

The temperature also affects the flavour of radish, Yip said, with warmer weather resulting in vegetables that are less sweet.

‘Choosing local’

By early afternoon on the Sunday that HKFP visited Blue Drop Kitchen, the first batch of radish cakes was fresh out of the steamer.

They were left to cool overnight before being packaged the next morning and delivered to customers’ homes, as well as shops and supermarkets.

Yim and Tso declined to say how many boxes they had sold this year. But they said they had no intention of doing big business.

“We cannot scale up. We have to think about the farmers and how much they can produce,” Yim said.

And because Blue Drop Kitchen relies on fresh harvests, it has a narrow window to make the radish cakes in time for the Spring Festival.

“We only have around 10 days,” Yim said. Besides traditional radish cake, the workers also make other Lunar New Year products like taro cake and vegan radish cake with mushrooms.

Yip also said his farm was already at capacity. He did not have enough farmers – he said he lost more than half his headcount after 2020 due to the emigration wave that followed the protests and unrest in 2019.

In any case, reaching the mass market has never been Yim and Tso’s aim. The entrepreneurs simply want to raise the profile of Hong Kong farmers and bridge the gap between the farmers and people who may think eating local is out of reach in a city that imports the vast majority of its produce.

Part of that effort is seen in the Instagram reels posted by Blue Drop Kitchen. The pair interview the farmers who supply their ingredients, capturing them as they harvest crops and prepare soil for sowing their next batch of produce.

“We want to give people the choice of choosing local,” Yim said.

“And when they make that choice, we hope they can know its origins and how it was grown.”