By Philippa Stevenson
A new, high-tech plant will boost the profitable and rapidly growing dairy export market for nutritional products made from whey, a waste product 15 years ago.
A week after Australian researchers announced the potential for medicinal uses of whey extracts, Anchor Products has opened a new generation whey protein
plant at its Hautapu factory, near Cambridge.
Driven to make more money from large volumes of milk, and to stop polluting waterways with dumped whey, the New Zealand industry began developing products from highly nutritional whey proteins 15 years ago.
Last year, whey products represented $160 million of the $420 million earned from nutritional ingredients, most of which are exported to North America.
Anchor's general manager, Gary Romano, said the $13 million plant would produce specialised products such as whey protein isolates, fractions and hydrolysates.
The fractionation unit, capable of producing 100kg of protein fractions a day, would be the first commercial plant in the country making the ingredients sought for sports drinks and infant formulas.
One fraction, alpha-lactalbumin, brought infant formula much closer to human mothers' milk.
It fetched more than $30,000 a tonne on the world market, but manufacturing costs were also high at around $20,000 a tonne.
Isolates, with very low fat and lactose levels, are also made by the Kiwi Dairy Company. Hydrolysates, used in infant formulas and sports products, are made at Tatua.
But Anchor site manager Gary Smith said the plant used new micro-filtration which made components more useful in final products.
