The New Zealand based dairy ingredients supplier company, Fonterra, recently opened their new North American corporate headquarters and laboratory in Chicago.
The laboratory — an application and sensory technical and development centre — will be used to work more closely with North American customers developing products using NZ technology and ingredients.
Fonterra’s US operations produce revenues of about $NZ2.67 ($NZ3.57) billion. The company runs a joint venture, DairiConcepts, with the largest dairy co-operative in the US, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), to process milk from DFA members into milk protein concentrates — increasingly used in chilled products such as dairy desserts — and milkpowders and specialty ingredients. Fonterra also works closely with Dairy America, a group of nine US-based co-operative dairy companies, to export US-origin milk powder into the global marketplace.
Fonterra previously had a base in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but collected a $US1.14 million ($NZ1.5 million) investment package from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity in the process of re-locating to Chicago.
“Fonterra sees exciting opportunities in its US business and we want to grow it together with our key customers,” said Fonterra USA’s chief operating officer, Martin Bates. “We also want to use the US as a supply base to allow us to work with our international customers to ensure quality exports are sourced from the US to meet growing international demand. The US is increasingly becoming a supplier to the world market, so we look at this as an opportunity to invest,” he said.
More than 50 percent of the skim milk powder sold by Fonterra internationally last year was manufactured in the US. The US market for fluid milk is the third-largest globally — behind India and the EU — and, according to US Department of Agriculture estimates, it could reach 27.5 million tonnes this year. In the US, Fonterra intends to continue making dairy ingredients, Mr Ferrier said.