Once upon a time, not so long ago in Japan, icecream was something to cool children on a hot day.
These days the grown-ups are catching onto what Kiwis have long known – icecream is an equal opportunity treat, at any time and the creamier the better.
Having denied themselves for so long, Japanese shoppers’ demand for super-rich icecream is now frenetic, says Fonterra.
The New Zealand dairy exporter is doing its best keep up, producing a new type of premium-earning mascarpone ingredient for icecream, made from cream that would otherwise go into commodities such as anhydrous milkfat (AMF).
But what the folk at Fonterra Te Rapa’s cream plant are particularly chuffed about is that they have been able to answer Fonterra farmer-shareholder demands for more added-value product innovation at minimal capital investment cost to farmers.
«We haven’t had to build a new plant, we’ve been able to apply existing technology in a way that allows us to switch our frozen cream line, where we have capacity, over to mascarpone quickly and easily,» says site operations manager, Fonterra NZ operations, Scott Nelson.
The technology tweak to a corner of Te Rapa’s existing cream plant cost $5 million. Given a new cream plant would cost $32m, Nelson reckons the new mascarpone line is minimum outlay for a maximum return. It created just two new jobs.
He won’t share production volumes or earning margins for commercial reasons, but the implication is that the cream that goes into the mascarpone for Japan is significantly more profitable than would be earned if its destination was AMF.
Or as another spokesman put it: «As an ingredient, it’s (the mascarpone) the highest you can push up the value-chain before getting into consumer food service products such as cottage cheese».
The Te Rapa cream plant, the only Fonterra site producing the mascarpone for Japan, makes around 30,000 tonnes of AMF a year. Fonterra sells AMF throughout the world for a range of uses including as an ingredient for chocolate, bakery foods and confectionery.
The mascarpone is different to the product Kiwis will be familiar with, says Te Rapa cream products plant manager Matt Walton.
«The mascarpone you find in most supermarket chillers is made to be balanced – slightly sweet, a bit creamy, but with a relatively low fat content.»
Te Rapa’s mascarpone is «creamier than cream, very rich».
Nelson describes it as having a «very intense, deep cream flavour» favoured by the Japanese palate.
The first exports of mascarpone were air freighted to Japan in April after a product development project of more than a year, starting with the science side at Fonterra’s Palmerston North research unit.
The product leaves the country frozen and will typically be shipped, with the first major shipment due to leave for Japan in January.
Nelson says Fonterra developed the mascarpone in response to market signals from its staff in Japan. A Euromonitor report showed sales of premium icecream at record levels last year, the company says. Fonterra will explore further Asian markets for the mascarpone.
Fonterra Te Rapa’s cream plant occupies a significant part of the big milk processing site north of Hamilton city. It produces 650,000 litres of cream a day at the peak of the season and incorporates two cream cheese processing lines, a butter production line and the mascarpone unit.
The Te Rapa site itself, one of Fonterra’s top five manufacturing sites nationwide, has four big spray powder driers and processes 7.5 million litres of milk daily at the season’s spring peak.
Source: Stuff
Link: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/86885034/fonterra-taps-into-japans-love-affair-with-icecream
