Voilà! French firm bakes in quality control, IP protection in China

Dongguan, China — Quality control and intellectual-property protection are two challenges all manufacturers operating in China ignore at their own peril.

French silicone kitchenware manufacturer Super Silicone takes a hands-on approach to both problems at its 5-year-old, 13,000-square-meter factory in Dongguan.

Super Silicone makes more than 150 different bakeware molds, ranging from the familiar cupcake, muffin and bread to such Gallic exotica as canelés (fluted pastry with a custard center) and financiers (a sort of fancy sponge cake). The factory also pours forth baking trays, steamers, funnels, ice cube trays, pot holders, hot plates, spatulas, spoons, ladles, whisks, rolling pins, tongs, ice cream-scoops and more.

All these products — more than 20 million pieces every year — are for preparing and storing food.

“We are very specialized in one thing — kitchenware. We don't make anything else,” company founder and CEO Jean-Charles Viancin said flatly.

Sixty percent of the company's $20 million in annual sales are in France — the country, after all, that invented madeleines and petit fours.

The boyish-looking Viancin spent five years trading silicone kitchenware in China before opening his factory. Processing 3,000 metric tons of silicone a year, it's bigger than any silicone kitchenware factory in Europe, he said.

Research into linking organic-based polymers to a silicon-oxygen backbone chain began in the late nineteenth century. Last year, the world market for silicones — technically known as polysiloxanes — topped $16 billion.

Super Silicone runs as many processes as possible in-house. It makes its own silicone resin. It makes all dyes and catalysts. It blends everything together, in a dust-free room.

“There is no outsourcing in this factory,” Viancin said.

The prepared resin has the stretchy feel of Silly Putty — no surprise, as the perennially popular toy was one of the first consumer applications of silicone. Out on the factory floor, workers cut and arrange it in vertical compression presses. The presses are more economical than injection molding machines for the company's short runs, Viancin said.

The product is carefully separated onto racks and cured in a large oven for five hours. Separating product is a must, said Viancin, to allow proper aeration.

After quality-control workers reject items with cosmetic blemishes, lab workers randomly choose 50 products every day — the factory runs around the clock, seven days a week — to be cut up, weighed, and baked at 230° C for four hours, then weighed again. It's a test for volatile organic materials (VOM) — not from the inert silicon-oxygen backbone, but from the additives. Super Silicone products regularly register less than 0.1 percent weight loss, Viancin said.

If any of the products lose more than 0.5 percent of their weight, the company will throw away the entire batch. In five years of operation, this has never happened, Viancin said. French standards, which are among the toughest in the euro zone, allow no more than 0.5 percent of a food-contact product to migrate to the food.

All tested samples are filed and stored for two years.

Work well, not fast

Super Silicone tasks its 250 employees to take quality-over-quantity approach, too. “We don't ask them to work fast. We ask them to work well,” Viancin said.

Some Super Silicone kitchen ware is reinforced with metal. “We own the [French] patent on metal in silicone,” Viancin said. Super Silicone workers make and weld the metal ribbons.

Some Super Silicone utensils and the company's biggest seller — a collapsible colander — require polypropylene or thermoplastic elastomer parts. These are made in an injection molding shop of eight machines, ranging from 90 to 320 tons.

All the metals and resins are tested by third-party labs.

“Many manufacturers don't know how to meet quality control standards,” said Viancin. “Quality has a cost.”

IP protection

You can battle intellectual property theft by lawyers, but that costs money and time, Viancin says. He prefers a much more proactive approach.

All the measures designed to assure a high level of quality control also reduce the risk of intellectual theft, Viancin said. The company's resin formula is as tightly controlled as Coca-Cola's, he said.

“Our raw material is our formula,” Viancin said. “There's another factory that makes it — no one [outside Super Silicone] knows where.”

As with production, all design is done in-house, often in collaboration with major customers. Except in Japan, where Super Silicone sells under its Maître Francais brand, the company is an OEM. “We are not a [major] brand and we don't want to be,” Viancin said. “It's always a partnership between us and the [corporate] brand.”

Out on the factory floor, while electronica music pours forth from speakers, a first-time visitor gets an eerie feeling. It takes a few moments to realize that no one is staring at a cell phone.

Banning all cell phones — not just smart phones — serves two major functions, said Viancin. It prevents workers from taking illicit pictures of prototypes and unreleased products. And it stops workers from wasting time.

Instead, the company relies on old-school walkie-talkies. The few workers who have used their phones in the factory have been fired on the spot.

Everyone must wear a cap: workers wear blue caps; managers, black; and quality control staff wear red caps; and visitors wear white. Staff are restricted to their work areas.

Super Silicone builds in extra layers of security both before and after the production process. It handles packaging and mold-making in-house — thereby eliminating two common venues for IP brigandage.

Making your own molds makes sense in the trendy kitchenware category. In five years of operation, the factory has made 1,100 molds for more than 600 items.

“The main strength of our company is innovation. Innovation. Innovation,” Viancin said.

Costs and growth

None of this is cheap.

The cost of that super-secret silicone formula is about 26 yuan ($4) per kilogram — “about one dollar for each item, just for the basic material,” Viancin said.

Then there are labor costs.

“Everyone in China complains that the cost of labor is increasing. But it's also increasing in France, Germany and the United States,” Viancin said.

Even though Pearl River Delta labor costs had already begun their steep climb eight years ago, when Viancin began looking for a site for a factory, he never really considered any location besides Dongguan, which at that time was the clear silicone capital of China. Viancin ticks off Dongguan's other attractions: a skilled and energetic labor force, superior infrastructure and an ideal location in the heart of the Guangzhou-Hong Kong-Shenzhen industrial triangle.

The company pays its workforce better than the average area manufacturer — a point Viancin emphasizes by pointing out the new cars outside the workers' dormitory.

Super Silicone foots the bill for three meals a day at the company cafeteria. The company also provides workers with an internet café, convenience store and outdoor patio. In a shrewd move in this singing-mad country, Viancin has even installed a karaoke parlor.

Still, Viancin is constantly on the lookout for ways to boost productivity. He plans to order bigger presses, running molds with 12 cavities, double the size of the current ones.

Viancin left school at 14. While trading silicone kitchenware, he gradually realized there was an unmet demand in his home country for kitchenware that met high food-safety standards. “I'd never built anything in my life,” he said, before inking a contract for a tumble-down lot in 2010.

“This factory has been built from zero,” said Viancin. “We built it like a French factory.” Indeed, the financing is entirely French.

After leaping 30 percent in 2014, sales are flat this year, mainly due to the falling euro and ruble. But Viancin expects heady sales growth to return next year, as Super Silicone products enter the American and Chinese markets. Stateside sales of silicone bakeware have slumped in recent years, but Viancin is sanguine that by working closely with U.S. brands — Wal-Mart is a key customer — to tailor products to U.S. market needs (read: bigger and higher-quality), the company will achieve success.

While China doesn't have a long tradition of baking — most households don't have an oven — the hobby is growing in popularity among the middle class, and in sheer numbers could soon surpass the French market, Viancin points out.

Japanese consumers snap up about 12 percent of Super Silicone products, including such specially designed products as miso bowls. Baking-crazy northern Europe, followed by Russia and Canada, are also popular destinations for Super Silicone ware. The company sells some kitchen utensils in Brazil.

Having learned the business over 10 years, Viancin plans to move forward deliberately. “Our target in the next five years is to enter the medical silicone market,” he said.

“Making a good product is a matter of being precise.”