The Irish Dairy Board (IDB), on the second day of a key trade mission to the country, have joined Lakeland Dairies and Glanbia by launching a range of UHT milk to capture a slice of what is one of China’s fastest growing food import sectors.
While shipping a product that is over 90pc water halfway around the world might appear inefficient to many, a wave of food scandals involving Chinese producers in recent years has ensured that consumers there will pay up to three times more for a product from abroad.
The IDB’s milk will be marketed under the famous Kerrygold logo, but with the additional moniker of Jin Kai Li, which translates from Mandarin as ‘Treasure song of happiness and luckiness’.
The company expects to sell millions of litres of the milk in a 200ml format. And it has doubled staff numbers in its Beijing office to 30 in preparation for a major ramping up in sales volumes over the coming years.
Later this week Glanbia will launch its version of a UHT milk. Lakeland Dairies already offers a product, which has contributed to a €10m market that did not exist just six years ago.
Kerry also launched the first infant formula product to be manufactured and packed in Ireland, and branded as Irish, in China this week.
Green LOVE+ is the culmination of a €100m investment by the company over the last three years, and the southwestern processor believes that it will sell 15,000 tonnes of the product into China and surrounding areas in the first year alone.
«This product is a key part of our plan to deal with the 20pc increase in milk output that we expect from our farmer suppliers in the first years after quotas cease next April,» said Kerry’s corporate affairs manager, Frank Hayes.
It will sell for approximately €43 per kg, which compares to just €9 per kg for the equivalent product being sold in Ireland.
The high price again reflects the concerns that Chinese consumers have about the safety of their locally-produced alternatives following a milk adulteration scandal that resulted in the deaths of many infants in 2008.
«The dairy industry for Ireland is like what the car industry stands for in Germany. We want to produce a premium product that is the best and costs a little more,» Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney told a group of China’s biggest dairy purchasers at a seminar organised by the trade mission in Beijing yesterday.
Source: Independent