Undercover Report Finds Grilled Sausages and 'Beef' Balls Made From Chicken-Neck Paste
An undercover report by Shandong broadcaster Lightning News found Chinese sausage and meatball plants grinding chicken necks and frames into paste — and flavoring 'beef' balls with additive and tallow while the ingredient list says beef.
The grilled sausages that rotate on rollers at convenience stores and school gates across China can be bought for two or three yuan, and an undercover report now explains what that price buys. Lightning News, the news app of Shandong Television, sent reporters into sausage and meatball plants in Henan Province and found a trade built on chicken necks and chicken frames — the parts with the least meat on them — ground into a paste and reshaped as something else.
At Qixian Xinrui Food, a manager explained that his company buys chicken necks and skeletons, grinds them into paste, and supplies makers of grilled sausages, meatballs and dumplings. His advice to the reporter was offered without prompting: eat less filled food. At Luohe Chenlu Food, the manager was more specific: skin-on chicken necks go into the paste that becomes sausages and balls.
The report's sharpest finding concerned the "juicy beef balls" sold at hotpot restaurants and street stalls. At Henan Hengyun Food, staff described the recipe plainly: the main ingredient is chicken-neck paste, the beef flavor comes entirely from beef-flavoring paste, and a little beef tallow lets the ingredient list say beef. Chicken paste itself is a legal raw material; what the report documents is labeling fraud, a product dressed as a more expensive one.
One scene captured how routine this is. As a delivery truck carrying chicken-neck paste drove into the yard of Luohe Yueli Food, the manager insisted his company never added it — "if we did, we could pay you ten times, a hundred times in compensation" — a flourish that one trend item paired with the observation that paste makers fill in their ingredient lists "as they please".
The economics are not mysterious. A sausage that retails for the price of a bottle of water cannot carry much pork or beef, and paste ground from necks and frames is among the cheapest meat a factory can buy. The gray area is narrow: paste in a sausage is fine if the label says so; a beef ball with no beef is not, and China's food-safety law lets buyers of mislabeled food claim ten-fold compensation — the same multiple the Luohe manager was so ready to promise.
The report drew wide attention on Weibo on Monday, with the top post on the topic forwarded more than 300 times within hours of publication and the phrase climbing Baidu's trend board alongside a second item about Henan paste makers' loose labeling. What has not yet appeared is an enforcement follow-up: no regulator has been named, no plant has been sealed, and the strongest warning on record so far came from inside the industry — the Qixian manager's advice to the reporter about what to eat less of.