Auckland Firm Perfects Milk Product For Export

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28573, 30 April 1958, Page 12

Auckland Firm Perfects Milk Product For Export

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, April 29. Overseas markets # are to be sought for a new processed milk, which has been developed by an Auckland company. The manufacturers today announced that the Dairy Produce Marketing Commission had given permission for the processed milk to be exported. Samples of the product —a concentrate of vegetable fat and blended milk powder—are being demonstrated now in Communist China by a New Zealand salesman. A British company already is using the Auckland company’s formula under licence in the United Kingdom. Other countries, including Western Germany, India, and Ceylon, are interested in making the milk concentrate using ingredients exported by New Zealand.The product has been perfected and fully tested. Sample packs have been shipped as deck cargo on freighters and sent twice round the world. Health authorities in Fiji have tested and approved it. Now the Marketing Commission has given the “green light,’’ the company is prepared to go ahead and make 80 tons of the concentrate a week. The plant output be increased as the market expands.

Approximately three ounces of the concentrate —sold at 2|d —will make a pint of milk. Vege-milk, as the new product is called, is the result of several years of research. The managingdirector of the company (Mr A. E. Hayman) selected the process for development in answer to a Government request to manufacturers to expand into secondary industries using New Zealand primary products. Mr Hayman, who has travelled widely in the Far East, saw in the processed milk a product which could supply all the nutritive properties of whole milk at a price within the reach of peoples in under-privileged countries. He regarded the process as a personal hobby and came out of retirement to supervise its development.