December 27, 2013

OAO Berezovsky Cheese-Making Plant will set up a facility to produce dried milk products at its Ivanovo branch in 2015, according to Konstantin Svirid, Director General of the management company of Brestmiasomolprom.

Currently Brest Oblast processes 93% of whey from local enterprises which produce cheeses, casein and cottage cheese. This is the best result in the country, Konstantin Svirid said. However, the objective is to reach full and advanced processing of all milk. The construction of the facility to produce dried milk products in Ivanovo was part of the 2010-15 dairy industry development programme.

The facility is expected to have a processing capacity of 600 tonnes of complex milk whey, or 60% of the entire amount of this secondary product. The facility will also produce up to 30 tonnes of substitute for skimmed milk. The rest of the secondary product, 40%, will be processed by OAO Savushkin Product. Apart from that, there are plans to set up a line to produce an entirely new product, milk and fat concentrate which are currently being imported.

According to Chief Engineer at Berezovsky Cheese-Making Plant Leonid Kachina, the enterprise is preparing a design to construct the new shop. The enterprise has also signed an agreement to supply production equipment with Italy's company Welko. The factory will be built in 2014, with major and auxiliary equipment to be installed the same year. New products will roll off the production line by the end of 2015 while the full capacity will be reached by 2016.

Leonid Kachina added that whey from casein, cottage cheese or cheese is difficult to be processed and such a technology is not in place in Belarus. It is to be mastered and tested on each product.

The investment project is estimated at €15 million (US$21 million). It is expected that half of the required sum will be provided by the investment fund of the Brest Oblast Executive Committee, while the rest will come from own funds and loans of Berezovsky Cheese-Making Plant. The implementation of the project will allow using the secondary product with zero production cost, increasing the effectiveness of production and ensuring the production of import-substituting and export-oriented products. In January-September 2013 Brest Oblast received about US$20 million from exports of products of whey processing, which accounts for 5.5% of the region's dairy export.