Arab girls lick ban with Christchurch help

Press, 19 February 1983, Page 19

Arab girls lick ban with Christchurch help

By

NEILL BIRSS

The girls in Bahrain are fond of raspberry ice-blocks from Christchurch, but it's not the flavour that attracts them. Cosmetics are frowned on in the Muslim Gulf State, but the Bahrain girls have found the raspberry Tip-Top popsicles give them nice red lips.

The General Foods Corporation factory in Blenheim Road is exporting icecream to Singapore. Malaysia, and the Middle East generally, but particularly to Bahrain.

■ General Foods as a whole is selling to 47 countries, says Mr John Lister, the general manager of the Export Division, who was in Christchurch for an Export Institute seminar this week.

In Bahrain and Tonga you will see icecream vans with the familiar Tip-Top slogan on them, and Saudi sales will soon be switched to this traditional trademark.

The icecream is just part of the General Foods export drive that has, for example, about SIM worth of cake from the firm’s Auckland bakery going to Saudi Arabia

each year, and icecream being delivered to such remote spots as Pitcairn Island.

Making the cake provides special problems, as vegetable fats have to be used instead of the normal animal fats, but there is no problem with the icecream as dairy products are fully acceptable to Muslims.

The firm exports millions of dollars worth of icecream lines a year, and about 80 per cent of the specialty lines come from the Christchurch factory, says Mr Lister. General’ Foods began exporting from the North Island, but exporting is increasingly being concentrated on Christchurch.

The plant at Blenheim Road employs about 200 people on site, when storage, distribution, and office workers are included.

The plant manager, Mr Don Hayes, says the exports from the Christchurch factory, which began about 1980, are an ideal complement to the seasonal demand for icecream in the South Island.

The peak demand from the Middle East comes in the slack season for consumption here.

The New Zealand icecream market is “on a plateau,” Mr Hayes says, with slow population growth and a declining proportion of children and young people in the market.

“The exports have put a lot of excitement into the plant,” he says. General Foods is shipping take-home icecream novelties such as tubs and sundaes, stick lines (which include ice-blocks), and premium products of the home market.

The exports go. in containers, each carrying product worth $lO,OOO or more, through Lyttelton, or Port Chalmers. Because of the bulk (for example, a container of meat with similar shipping costs might be worth $90,000), the freight is a high proportion of the final cost. Of each $3 in retail price in the export market, says Mr Lister, about $1 will be production cost, $1 freight, and $1 mark-up.

For this charge, however, the icecream shippers are now getting sophisticated service. Each refrigerated container's ‘ temperature is computer monitored at a specified level. (The optimum temperature for icecream is —2sdeg.) The local content is high, the main raw materials, fresh cream and milk, being bought from the Canterbury Dairy Farmers' Milk Station. Ltd. next door in Blenheim Road. Other raw materials include glucose and sugar. Labelling has provided a challenge, with stamps in local languages being used, and soon label and consumtion expiry date will have to be printed on each packet of the food. One of the few universal things has been the sense of taste. There is slight catering to local tastes, such as the shipping of mango icecream rather than the home flavour, mango-orange. But chiefly General Foods has found that what tastes good to the kids of Christchurch tastes good to the kids of the Middle East.