Heichiao / Black Bridge Foods (黑橋牌食品)

Heichiao — literally "Black Bridge" — takes its name from a black wooden footbridge that once crossed the Tainan canal, known locally as "Ou-kio-a." Founder Chen Wen-hui, born in 1932 into a poor fishing village near Kaohsiung and orphaned young, set up a small family meat workshop beside that bridge in 1957 after finishing military service, having learned curing technique from masters trained in Xiamen. Because the workshop had no sign, neighbors simply called its product "sausage from beside the black bridge" — the name that stuck.

Chen's real break was technical: where traditional Taiwanese sausage was dry and heavily salted, he reworked the recipe around fresh, same-day-slaughtered pork with a shorter cure, producing a sweeter, moister style that reshaped the category. He opened his first storefront on Haian Road in Tainan's Sakariba district in 1963, formally incorporated as Tzu Wei Chen Foods Co. in 1973 (registering "Heichiao" as the trademark), and in 1979 moved production to Anping Industrial Park in what the company describes as Taiwan's first automated meat-processing plant. The company took its current name, Heichiao Enterprise Co., in 2009.

The brand today makes sausage as its flagship product alongside pork jerky, ham, bacon, German-style sausage and pork knuckle, meat floss, and seasonal gift boxes, sold through its own site and run out of a roughly 5,000-square-meter Tainan facility that now also houses a public Sausage Museum. The company states its operating principle plainly: "using good intentions to make good sausages."