Hebei Inatural Biotech Co., Ltd.

Hebei Inatural Biotech Co., Ltd., registered in Chinese as 河北一然生物科技股份有限公司, works on lactic acid bacteria and probiotics from the Zhengding high-technology industrial development zone in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province. A strain incubation centre was set up in 2008, industrial-scale trials succeeded in 2011, and the company was formally established that year.

It was the first company in China to hold a production licence for edible lactic acid bacteria and drafted the first Chinese production standard for them. Output is grouped into seven product series, among them yoghurt starter cultures and single-strain probiotics such as Lactobacillus plantarum Lp45. The cultures are sold into food processing, livestock and aquaculture, crop production, preventive medicine and health supplements, and the company takes ODM and OEM work.

Research is run with more than 20 Chinese universities and institutes alongside academic advisers from the United States and Japan, through a Hebei provincial engineering laboratory for probiotic function and application. The company maintains the YMCC culture collection, which holds over 2,000 strains. It has been recognised as a Hebei gazelle enterprise.