Taiwan's biggest food conglomerate sold gutter oil as cooking oil

On 4 September 2014, Taiwanese authorities announced they had raided an unlicensed oil plant in Pingtung that mixed recycled waste oil and animal by-products, roughly a third of the blend, into a product sold as 'Quanton fragrant lard.' The buyer was Chang Guann, a mid-sized oil supplier, which resold the mixture to 235 downstream food manufacturers — among them Wei Chuan, a household food brand controlled by Ting Hsin International, one of Taiwan's largest conglomerates and the operator of the Master Kong (康师傅) instant-noodle brand across the Taiwan Strait.

Wei Chuan pulled twelve meat products, including its ground-pork and pork-floss lines, as soon as the contamination was confirmed. Investigators later found Ting Hsin's own oil-processing arm had separately imported feed-grade oil from Vietnam and passed it off as food-grade — a second sourcing decision, not just a downstream contamination, that deepened the group's exposure once it came to light in October 2014.

Consumers responded with an organised, sustained boycott rather than a short-lived news cycle: schools and government offices across Taipei, New Taipei and Taichung suspended all Ting Hsin and Wei Chuan purchasing, a consumer group built an app to help shoppers avoid the brands, and campaigns culminated in late-2015 protests demanding the group's exit from Taiwan altogether. Four listed companies tied to the scandal lost roughly RMB 1.4 billion in combined market value within four trading days of the initial disclosure.

The reputational damage outlasted the criminal cases. Ting Hsin's Taiwan instant-noodle operation — the market Master Kong itself had grown out of — could not recover sales lost to the boycott and was liquidated in 2015. Chang Guann and its downstream customers reached a settlement with victims in 2022, with Ting Hsin agreeing to pay roughly NT$170 million.

Ting Hsin paid NT$170M and lost ~¥1.4B market cap in 4 days as an organized boycott forced its Taiwan noodle business to shut down.

Wei Chuan's procurement bought 'lard' without verifying its source, letting a cost-driven substitution — a third recycled waste oil — reach packaged food.

Ting Hsin's own import arm separately mislabeled Vietnamese feed-grade oil as food-grade, compounding a supplier's failure with its own sourcing shortcut.

New revelations kept arriving through September and October 2014, so the story stayed alive for weeks instead of closing with one complete accounting.

Ting Hsin misjudged how far an organised boycott could reach — schools, government offices and retail all moved together faster than trust could be restored.

A boycott over food safety is not a PR problem to be managed with statements — it is a sourcing failure, and only a verifiable fix to the supply chain, not an apology, will end it.

Ting Hsin's Taiwan instant-noodle business was liquidated in 2015 as boycott-driven sales losses became structural rather than temporary. Chairman-level executives faced prosecution, and the group spent the following years rebuilding trust in mainland China's Master Kong business while its Taiwan home market largely stayed lost.