Chu Shijian, whom was once convicted and in prison for embezzling 1.1billion yuan, has now become owner of an orange brand. After serving a three year sentence, Chu bought a plot of land in Yuxi and began breeding oranges. This has now grown into a business worth 30 million yuan.
Chu is CEO and founder of Yuxi-based fruit company and his products are 'Chu oranges'. Due to his success, Chu faces one major problem in China - copycat competitors, which market fruit with Chu's name and label, despite not growing the oranges anywhere near his farms.
His company is working with online retailers to make sure consumers are able to tell his oranges apart from these 'copycats'. Chu has been involved in developing a system, with e-commerce giant Alibaba, where QR codes are used to guarantee each individual fruit is one of his own. China Business News said "an identifying 2-dimensional bar code is affixed to each of Chu's oranges, which features the place of origin, grower and time it was picked...if someone wants to try and sell fake Chu oranges, they have to first collect 2-D bar codes from Chu oranges."
