Sanquan's dumplings tested positive for African swine fever — shelves emptied in days

On February 15, 2019, news broke that Sanquan guantang pork dumplings sold in Luxi County, Hunan, had tested positive for African swine fever virus nucleic acid; the company received the official notice from the Xiangxi prefecture's epidemic control office the next day. The suspect batches — including batch 20190113H of the 1000g pork dumpling — had been produced by Henan Quanhui, Sanquan's wholly-owned subsidiary. ASF does not infect humans, but in the middle of China's worst swine fever epidemic, pork that tested positive was unsellable.

Within days the line was gone from JD.com's self-operated shelves, Taobao and Suning, and from Sanquan's own flagship stores. The company sealed 24,127 cases of the suspect dumplings — worth ¥2.17 million — for harmless destruction, and its first dedicated ASF PCR instrument, a Roche LightCycler 96, arrived on February 17. On February 18 the Shenzhen Stock Exchange sent an attention letter asking whether disclosure had been timely and whether any other pork batch had tested positive.

The testing machine's arrival date is the story: until the scandal the company had no ASF assay of its own — intake checks leaned on quarantine certificates, supplier reports and outside labs — in a country where the epidemic had been culling pigs for months. Sanquan told the exchange it could not yet assess the hit to its year, and admitted it could not guarantee absolute freedom from contamination.