April 30, 2010

Australia's National Foods shuts plant and expands another

Milk company National Foods has announced it will close its Booval processing plant at Ipswich near Brisbane, and upgrade its other site at Crestmead, south of Brisbane.

National Foods Queensland operations manager Mark Toomey said there will be job losses from the 100-strong workforce at Booval, but some staff will be redeployed to other facilities.

An AUD55-million (US$51-million) upgrade at the Crestmead site will boost processing capacity from 140 million litres to 250 million litres by early 2012, according to Toomey.

Farmer suppliers to the company will not notice any change to tanker schedules or volumes of milk required, he added.

Ches Prebenough, a dairy farmer from Southern Queensland, supplies a million litres a year to National Foods from his 140-cow dairy.

"They've asked us to increase our production by 12%, so obviously they're looking at more milk sales further down the track and they need a factory to be able to do that," Prebenough said.