D A I R Y F E AT U R E ON ONE of New Zealand’s busiest retail days, the tiny pioneering town of Eltham in South Taranaki is decidedly quiet. It’s mid-morning on a fine Christmas Eve, and the back streets fringed with faded abandoned old merchant stores held together with peeling paint appear deserted by the gift-buying farming community that surrounds it. You can almost see the ghosts of colonial traders who built these side shops standing in the boarded-up windows lamenting the exodus of Christmas shoppers to the big lights of Stratford and New Plymouth to the north, and Hawera to the south. They cluck to each other, shake their heads and watch as the cars pass by along the main drag, wondering what has happened in the short space of a century. If, however, instead of whipping through the quaint town towards the urban centres you turn left off the main road in the middle of town and head down Bridge St, the other face of Eltham is revealed. Away from the speeding traffic, over the railway line and you’d be forgiven for blinking twice as you enter a commercial compound filled with cars, people and activity. It’s almost enough to make you brake and wonder what alternative dimension you’ve unwittingly 16 www.foodtechnology.co.nz driven into. Car parks are scarce and people scurry between an assortment of different complexes that hug the rail line. It’s as if the colonial side of Eltham has gone, replaced instead by 21st century technology. The only clue to where you are is in the familiar branding of Fonterra, one of New Zealand’s largest co-operative companies. Its logo seems to permeate through everything you can see…in fact, if you were airlifted into the town from deepest Africa and had no idea where you were, it would be easy to think that the tiny town of Eltham was indeed called Fonterra. The company has operated sites in the town since the late 1880s, with Collingwood St handling secondary milk produce. It’s the fourth largest Fonterra site in New Zealand, and deals with products such as frozen, shredded and processed cheeses. Fonterra employs 160 staff in Eltham, and has a profound effect on not just the town but also the Taranaki community. It’s a partnership the company is proud of; a plant that operates 24 hours per day at least 50 weeks a year in any part of New Zealand would impact just as strongly. Ask site manager Brendon Birss ‘Why Eltham?’ and he breaks into a smile. Why not? he says. “We have more than 100 years of cheese-making history in this town, which sits centrally in Taranaki and has easy access to other commercial centres. We are committed to Eltham. There’s a relationship here that’s unique and this project illustrates that.” What he’s referring to is a $32 million project to double the site’s sliced cheese-making capability for customers in Australasia, the Middle East and South East Asian countries like China, Taiwan and the Philippines. Amongst those clients are high profile fast food companies like McDonalds, Subway and Burger King, which means making to order for an ever-more demanding fast food market in the Southern Hemisphere. These companies use around four million slices of cheese a day…enough each year, in fact, to circle the world three times around. Of importance is the burgeoning demand for packed and unpacked cheese slices, for which the company has expanded its facility significantly to accommodate a new processing machine from Germany. Once fully completed this month, the site will be able to make around 2.3 billion slices of cheese each year…at 2000 slices a minute, that’s both impressive and awe-in- TALES OF A DAIRY TOWN
FT FEB2016-HR
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