Sure, the milk comes to the dryer in a tanker and comes out in a 25kg brown paper bag but there are a whole lot of things happening in the middle that happen nowhere else in New Zealand.
And it’s those things in the middle that have brought a specialised workforce from around the world to the South Otago valley.
“We’re not producing milk powder. We’re producing a food for the most vulnerable in society, for our babies, and for that we believe we need control from the cow right through to the consumer and that is what we have in Otago,” Danone Nutricia’s managing director Corine Tap said from Sydney.
“Controlling everything from the cow to the product is very important for us and very important for the mums who buy it.
“Being able to put ‘Made in NZ on our baby formula is what we want to be able to do as NZ is known worldwide for its high-quality milk,” she said.
The plant’s two tankers visit only 18 farms, all owned by Dunedin man Grant Paterson. Most of the farms have 50:50 sharemilkers and the furthest away is near Gore.
The dryer works 24 hours a day, every day of the year, processing 40 million litres of milk into base powder for Nutricia’s 0-6 months and 6-12 months baby formula range.
Paris-based Danone, a global food company which specialises in fresh dairy products, water, early life nutrition and medical nutrition, bought the 2012-built plant in August 2014 from Paterson and Auckland-based food packaging company Sutton Group.
It’s spending €15 million ($NZ 25.5m),doubling capacity, with Clydevale now producing base powder for NZ, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Chinese markets, and the plant is on track to soon produce all the base powder for the age range Danone requires for Asia.
“It’s about quality, not quantity from Clydevale and in 2017 we aim to be able to do that,” Tap said.
Danone Early Life Nutrition NZ operations director Cyril Marniquet, who lives in Auckland but visits the factory regularly, is already hoping for a second dryer to be built there.`
“We’re in global discussions about it. There’s no time frame but we really want to work with NZ farmers because of the efficient farming practices here but more importantly because of the quality of milk produced.
“NZ milk is of the highest quality with a high protein content which we want for our infant formula.”
Increasing the number of cows that supply the plant won’t be difficult with farmers already knocking on the reception door at Clydevale wanting in. Processing winter milk might also become an option.
Currently the factory uses skim milk powder it has already processed for production through June, July and the first half of August and has agreements with neighbouring Open Country, Oceania and Synlait plants in Southland and South Canterbury to take excess milk.
“We have very good relationships with our neighbours,” Marniquet said.
It also has a new relationship with the University of Otago, with a graduate programme giving jobs to science students there.
“We’re looking for the best people to come and work with us and not only do they get to work here but we also send them overseas to our other plants.”
When Danone bought Clydevale it kept all the staff and added more, with 90 people now employed onsite.
The company is not keen to share too much of the detail about what happens between the milk coming into the plant and exiting as bagged base powder, but it involves pasteurisation, the removal of milk fat because the fatty acids in baby formula come from vegetable oils which are added in the plant, along with minerals and vitamins before drying, and packing into bags.
The vegetable oil comes from a supplier in the North Island and the vitamins and minerals from a mix of NZ and overseas suppliers.
The milk fat is sold to a dairy trader.
The bags are put on a pallet and trucked to Port Otago, then shipped to Auckland or Thailand for further blending as a dry product and canning.
The science behind it is done at research and development centres at Utrecht in the Netherlands, and in Singapore.
At Clydevale the highest of quality and food safety standards are maintained – even my camera had to be sanitised before it was allowed in and my pen had to be left behind – but that attention starts on the farm.
Last spring Danone fitted every dairy which supplies Clydevale with new coolers to make sure milk is at the right temperature before it reaches the vat. Testing milk for residues and bacteria is rigorous.
Sustainability is also important for the company. They have ruled out feeding palm kernel onfarm and the LPG-powered plant will change to a wood pellet-fired boiler, a first for the NZ dairy industry, in the next few years.
By 2050 the company plans to be globally carbon emissions-neutral.
Although Danone won’t say what it’s paying its dairy farmers, it says sustainability is also important when it comes to them.
“We see the NZ raw milk price swinging between $8 and $4 as being too volatile,” Marniquet said.
“We want our farmers to be able to farm using the best possible practices and they can’t do that at low prices so we are making sure they are able to be sustainable in the long-term.
“These guys have to get a decent margin out of what they do.”
“We are trying to take the price volatility out of future contracts as much as possible,” Danone Nutricia Early Life manufacturing director NZ Remy Charbonnel said.
“In France we have much smaller farms which supply us but most of the cows there are housed.
“We like how the cows are farmed here, it looks a lot more natural and we like them eating grass,” he said.
“We want the farmers to be able to keep farming like that.”
Marniquet said Danone’s thinking for NZ was long-term.
“That’s why we are in NZ, because we believe dairy will be here for a long time and the milk quality will always be high.”
Back to the beginning
Buying the Clydevale dryer was very much about the Karicare company returning to its beginnings, Danone Nutricia’s managing director Corine Tap said.
Nutricia, which become part of Danone in 2007, dates back to when Sir Truby King, the founder of Plunket, began testing cow’s milk as a replacement for breast milk for malnourished babies in the early 1900s and opened hospitals for babies and their mothers – the first at Karitane, north of Dunedin.
The Karitane Products Society developed and sold its first milk formulas in 1927 and the range was licensed to Douglas Pharmaceuticals for distribution in Australasia and Asia in 1986. Ten years later the company was sold to Nutricia, which still uses the brand name Karicare.
“It’s one of the few stories in the world, where one individual’s mission to fight malnutrition made such a big impact on the health of babies back then and that still is continuing today,” Tap said.
“So you can understand why we feel very passionate about this part of the world.
“We’ve come back home.”
