Enjoy a local bean curd dish on the mainland and you could be eating soya beans grown in South America, shipped to China by a multinational food company and processed in a large, foreign-owned crushing plant, making one of the mainland's humblest foods a dish served up by the world's powerful multinationals.
Throughout China there are small presses churning out oil and meal.
However, in the past two years companies such as Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill, which control much of the world's food supply, have bought significant market shares in China's soya bean crushing industry from troubled domestic crushers.
They are betting that their global reach and higher efficiency, together with steadily growing demand, will produce profits where smaller local companies have failed.
Hong Kong's Noble Group plans to give these big players a run for their money. It entered the global food trade five years ago; the ABCs of the business - ADM, Bunge and Cargill - have all been at it for well over 100 years.
'We plan to expand our crushing capacity in China to about 10 per cent of all imported beans in [the country], which would mean going from one million tonnes (crushing capacity) to three million next year,' says Ricardo Leiman, Noble's chief operating officer and the man behind its expanding agriculture business.
