Helping to turn a one-time problem into billions of dollars of annual profit will be part of Kevin Marshall’s enduring legacy to the New Zealand dairy industry.
And for providing his opportunity to do that, you can probably thank his desire to make sure his then fiancée, now wife, Julie had a job to go to.
It’s been quite a journey from the young man who graduated from the University of Canterbury with a bachelor of chemical engineering in the early 1960s knowing nothing about farming or the dairy or food industries.
On graduation Marshall had a couple of job offers but chose the NZ Dairy Research Institute (DRI) in Palmerston North over a job at a lactose company in Kapunga, Taranaki, because Julie, a nurse, would be more likely to get a job in Palmerston North.
“That’s why I went to the dairy research institute. It’s as simple as that,” Marshall said.
“I knew absolutely nothing about dairying.”
Marshall says when he started at the DRI it was undergoing a major expansion.
“There had been a realisation amongst NZ dairy farmers that Britain was going to go into the EEC and there was a threat to the major exports we had, which were butter and cheese, pretty well all of which went to the mother country, the UK,” he said.
“So the industry decided that rather than go out of business, that instead it would boost its research to try and make new products.”
That was in 1963 and Marshall was part of an intake of researchers tasked with developing the number of products the industry could produce.
“It was a very exciting and interesting time to start there,” he said.
“There were a lot of naysayers saying the industry is going to have to go, we’re just going to have to get out of dairying. It’s not going to continue.
“But the senior people in the industry were absolutely determined that wasn’t going to happen.
“We were just starting our work on drying milk powder. There had been a little bit of drying going on in the industry but not a lot. There was some roller drying but spray drying had started overseas and we started to bring that into NZ.”
In his early days at the DRI, whey was something that was either disposed of into streams, which helped grow big eels, or fed to pigs, neither of which helped dairy farmers.
How times have changed, with the work Marshall was involved in during his early days at the DRI now worth billions of dollars a year to the NZ dairy industry, thanks to the products and technologies it helped develop downstream.
Marshall says his work helping develop whey protein concentrate in the mid-60s and early 70s is among his many career highlights, as finding a use for whey was a significant issue facing the dairy industry as it was a pollutant.
At that time, Coca Cola was looking for a protein they could add to their beverages and the company approached the NZ dairy industry to see if it could produce significant quantities of whey protein concentrate.
“We had no idea how we were going to do it,” he said.
One of his colleagues who was in the States doing a PhD was asked to look into what technologies might be available to help.
He recommended ultrafiltration, a membrane technology that could separate protein from the other whey components.
“We got money from the dairy board and we built a pilot plant at the DRI and proceeded, after many trials and tribulations, to produce enough whey protein concentrate for Coca Cola to test,” he said.
“We learned a huge amount about ultrafiltration. We learned a huge amount about beverage manufacture. And we were successful. We produced a product that they required.
“They then changed their marketing plan.
“So, we were left with this wonderful product, with absolutely fantastic technology, but with nowhere to go.
“We spent another two years after that finding uses for it and were eventually very successful.”
Today whey protein concentrates are now used in a wide range of products, including sports drinks.
On top of that the ultrafiltration technology has been adapted and used in a variety of other applications in the industry.
Marshall says during a review of the work that was submitted for a chemical engineering award in 2015, Fonterra said that the combination of the technologies involved and the products produced were worth about $5 billion a year to the co-op.
“We’d gone from something that was a waste product, through a completely unknown technology, and wondering what the hell we were going to do with it, to something that was that valuable,” he said.
He says there is plenty of scope for the dairy industry to develop new products, but it should not ignore its core business.
“I get very tired of people who say the industry should get out of commodity milk powder. I’m sorry, but commodities can make a lot of money if you do it right and on the whole the NZ dairy industry does it right,” he said.
He says because the NZ dairy herd is grass-fed, its milk is seen as desirable for a variety of reasons, including its nutritional value and climate change benefits.
“The net effect is that NZ’s so-called commodities of butter, cheese and milk powder have a premium in world markets. It ain’t great, but it’s over a significant tonnage and therefore it makes a difference.”
Having said that, he says there is still opportunity for new products.
“That’s why we have got to continue to invest in fundamental science for a start, because when it came down to the crunch the work that we did with whey protein concentrate was informed by fundamental protein science that had been done for some years beforehand,” he said.
“Then we need applied science, we need technology development – all of those things still have to happen.”
He says an example of how that works is the mozzarella cheese made at Clandeboye, which had its genesis in work done more than 20 years ago.
“That science was built on and then the technology was developed in more recent times as the market need arose,” he said.
“That’s a very valuable product to us now.”
Marshall is very optimistic about the future of the NZ agri-food industry, saying it has built-in advantages over the rest of the world, especially in the areas of climate and water.
“Because of that there will always be a demand for our product if we pitch it right,” he said.
He does not buy into the argument that international markets for meat and milk will disappear because of increasing demand for plant-based alternatives.
“I think there will be a significant increase in plant-based alternatives but it won’t stop some parts of the world’s population continuing to eat meat and drink milk,” he said.
Although NZ can play a part in developing some of those alternatives and some farmers will diversify into that, Marshall says it would be a mistake if as a country we turned our back on our traditional primary products.
“There’s no question in my mind that if we stopped producing milk at all, tomorrow that milk will be produced somewhere else in the world at a significantly higher impact on the environment,” he said.
