| Nestle opens milk powder factory in North China |
SHANGHAI, July 6 -- NESTLE Group opened a 200 million yuan (US$26.3 million) milk powder factory in China yesterday, aiming to meet the nation's growing demand for good nutrition.
The new plant is in Hulun Buir in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and employs 145, Francois-Xavier Perroud, spokesman for the world's biggest food and beverage maker, said in a phone interview from Switzerland yesterday.
The factory will be used mostly to make milk powder from fresh milk collected from more than 4,300 farmers across a 10,000-square-kilometer area of high-quality grasslands.
It will also supply other products including ice cream and confections exclusively for the Chinese market, Perroud said.
"Milk products are Nestle's biggest single business in China, one of the fastest-growing markets for Nestle worldwide," the spokesman said.
"Our existing capacity is not sufficient any longer to cope with increasing consumer demand."
Nestle has other two milk powder manufacturing facilities in China, in the northeastern Heilongjiang Province and Chongqing in the southwest.
China's demand for milk products has been growing rapidly as the booming economy increases consumer purchasing power and people opt for healthy foods.
A baby boom that started last year is also helping sales.
China's dairy sales rose 23 percent last year to 104.1 billion yuan. The demand for dairy products has more than doubled in the five years and will grow 12.8 percent a year to almost 40 million tons by 2010, Rabobank Groep said in a 2006 report.
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