Nestlé enlarges plant to process long life milk
Valor Econômico
Nestlé Brasil announces today investments for its first long life milk plant in Brazil. The plant of Araraquara, in the interior of São Paulo, will be enlarged for the production of the product. Since the decade of 1940, the Swiss multinational company manufactures the Moça condensed milk in the plant that currently has 220 employees. The initial production of the line will be of 5 million liters a month, according to estimates of the Food Workers Union of the city.
The company - that is the greatest purchaser of milk of the country - only entered in the retail of long life milk this year, in the beginning of April, with the brands Molico and Ninho, manufactured by the outsourcing made by Shefa, in Amparo (SP). Last year, Nestlé purchased 1.9 billion liters of milk that it used for its own food production.
The milk produced in Araraquara should be in the market between the next October and November. Soon after that, or simultaneously to it, the Nestlé production starts being distributed in Carazinho (RS). Little less than a month ago, the company closed a lease agreement with Laep Investments, which controls Parmalat, of the unit of Rio Grande do Sul for 35 years. Parmalat will continue producing in Carazinho until the end of this month, when Nestle will take over the plant to start its program of adaptation and modernization of the production.
Today, the national retail of long life milk has operations of R$ 5.031 billion (US$ 2.6 billion) a year (Nielsen data related to 2008). Last year, in volume, there was a small retraction of 1% in sales. In Dollars, however, the earnings grew 5.8%, going from US$ 2.7 billion in 2007 to US$ 2.8 billion last year. The three major brands - Parmalat, Elegê and Batavo - control 23.9% of the market, according to Nielsen. Long life milk is regularly consumed by 84.3% of the Brazilian homes, according to LatinPanel.