In the heart of Khun Han District, in Thailand’s Sisaket Province, there’s a striking body of water — a man-made lake known as the Huai Tha Reservoir. Looming over its western shore is an enormous yellow building that nearly everyone in this region recognizes immediately. Locals call it the Ginger Farm. More accurately, it’s the Ginger Factory.
This imposing structure is the centerpiece of the Sayam Brand production facility — a company known for producing a wide range of food products, with ginger at the core of its operation.
I was fortunate enough to be invited here for a private filming visit to document the facility. But by the time our schedules aligned, circumstances on the ground had shifted dramatically. The skirmish along the Thai–Cambodian border was underway, and at just thirty kilometers from the border, this facility sits well inside what had been designated a red zone.
As a precaution, most of the hundreds of workers who are normally here had evacuated to shelters or safer areas farther inland. Production was largely paused. Only a small number of staff remained, keeping limited operations running.
Because of that, what you’re seeing here is best understood as Part One — a glimpse inside for the curious, a first-look preview of what will come later. Not the full story, but an important introduction.
The facility itself is expansive and impressive. Established in 1985, the company began as a producer of salted ginger, exporting primarily to Japan. Within just a few years, it expanded into producing its own pickled ginger, offering multiple variations of sliced ginger products as demand grew.
Over time, the product line broadened significantly to include dehydrated tropical fruits like pineapple, papaya, and mango — now exported to countries across the globe, including Japan, Korea, Germany, Poland, Russia, Argentina, France, and the United States.
Once a year, raw ginger from carefully selected growers in the mountainous regions near Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai arrives in a convoy of tandem-axle trucks. From there, it’s offloaded, washed, and prepared for state-of-the-art cold storage… staged to be processed over the months that follow.
At its core, the company’s vision is to remain deeply market- and customer-focused, continuously improving production processes while maintaining the highest standards of efficiency and hygiene. Sayam Brand also works closely with its network of farmers, providing ongoing education and guidance to help optimize raw materials from the ground up.
Before we left, the owners were kind enough to send us home with a sample of one of their products and a nice ginger tea. And I have to say — there’s something about the smell of fresh ginger moving through this place that feels calming… almost grounding. It’s a sensory reminder of the care taken here, and of the quality these walls are built to protect.