Located in Mangere, the site has an annual packaging capacity of 32,000 metric tonnes (MT), doubling Synlait’s overall canning capacity to 64,000 MT.
“We’re expecting customer demand for consumer packaged products to increase significantly in the near term,” Synlait managing director and chief executive John Penno said.
“We’ve invested $55 million into our Auckland site to meet this demand and expect commercial production to start here in the coming week.
“A tremendous amount of work has gone into this milestone. We acquired this partially-completed facility in May and have executed a significant programme of work to commission it in just over six months,” he said.
The facility would employ 30 people but that number was expected to increase to 100 in the coming year as additional shifts were added.
Mayor Goff said it was a pleasure welcoming innovative, high value businesses such as Synlait to Auckland.
“The new site in the high growth commercial district around our airport will create 100 jobs in our city and increase the amount of safe, premium dairy products, for which New Zealand is well known, heading to major markets around the world.”
The strategic decision to invest in Auckland has helped to mitigate some of the single site risk faced by Synlait with their original Dunsandel site in Canterbury, as well as increasing future growth in business with infant formula customers.
Acquiring the partially-completed site has also allowed additional consumer packaging capacity to become available much earlier to Synlait than a new development would have.
“We are currently operating at capacity in our canning facility at Dunsandel. Having Auckland in place means we can meet our customers’ needs and continue to grow with them,” Penno said.
Registration of the new facility with both MPI (Ministry for Primary Industries) and CNCA (Certification and Accreditation Administration of the People's Republic of China) was progressing.
“We have conditional approval from MPI and we expect to finalise this, along with other registration requirements, very soon. We expect to commence commercial production this week,” Penno said.
