www.dairyindustries.comDAIRY INDUSTRIES international January 2015

ers looking for ‘easy-to-di-gest’ dairy foods,” says Merel Roes, global marketing man-ager Maxilact at DSM Food Specialties. “Our survey re-veals that Chinese consum-ers, buying lactose-free, are eating more yogurt than three years ago, compared to the overall Chinese consumers surveyed.”

other markets surveyed in-cluding US, Brazil, Turkey, Poland and France.

The report also found that improving digestibility would further increase yogurt con-sumption. If it was easier to digest, Chinese consumers that have not increased their consumption of the dairy food over the last three years re-port that they would eat more yogurt.

“We see that lactose-free and low-lactose dairy is in-creasingly popular in China. Lactose-free dairy is per-ceived to be healthier than regular yogurt and addresses the gut-conscious consum-

World News

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New discoveries within milk science are revealing un-tapped opportunities to re-lieve some of the world’s most pressing nutritional challeng-es. Many point to future in-gredient solutions, calling for technology that can both ex-tract tiny amounts of bioactive components from bovine milk and maintain their beneficial bioactivity during processing into commercial products, ac-cording to those attending the International Milk Genomics Consortium (IMGC).

“Among the big challeng-es are obesity, diabetes and food security for the grow-ing global population. As the only product made by nature for consumption, milk is the best place to learn about op-timal nutrition,” says Peter Langborg Wejse, senior food scientist at Arla Foods Ingre-dients. His comment followed the 2014 symposium of the IMGC. Held over three days, the annual event gathered more than 120 university and industrial scientists from 17 countries at Aarhus Univer-

sity in Denmark. Arla Foods Ingredients was among the sponsors.

The presentations covered the latest research ranging from the role of genomics in sustainable dairy production to how insights into wallaby milk may contribute to opti-mised nutrition for pre-term infants. “IMGC is a pre-com-petitive platform for under-standing and accelerating the biological processes underly-ing milk genomics and trans-lating that knowledge into something industry can use,” says Gonca Pasin, executive director of the California Dairy Research Foundation, which has managed IMGC since its inception in 2004. Wejse, too,

is confident that the research will lay the foundations for developing more, highly spe-cialised bioactive ingredients derived from whey.

Arla Foods Ingredients launched the first commer-cially available osteopontin, Lacprodan OPN-10, for in-fant formulas. A glycoprotein identified in human milk but present in bovine milk at a much lower level, OPN is be-lieved to support the devel-opment of the infant immune system and protect against pathogenic infections.

Attention is also now being focused on oligosaccha-rides, which promote the development of healthy gas-trointestinal bacteria.

DSM has published a paper investigating the reasons be-hind Chinese consumption of yogurt products.

The report, based on a sur-vey carried out in a variety of countries including China, the US, Brazil and Turkey, found that the perceived gut health benefits and added probiotics are driving higher demand for yogurt in China than the other countries surveyed. Eight out of ten Chinese consum-ers actively seek products containing added probiotics, and 76% of Chinese con-sumers choose yogurt for its gut health benefits compared to an average of 48% in the

Rising yogurt consumption in China

NZ hits record highThings are sunny in New Zealand, with a record in milk production reported by New Zealand dairy statistics for 2013-14, released by LIC and Dairy NZ. The country’s 4.92 million cows produced more than 20 billion litres in the season, with 1.83kg of milk solids. This was worth $15.5 billion (€9.7bn). Inter-estingly, 65% of the increase came from the North Island, which suffered drought in the previous year. The South Is-land’s increase was due to an additional 103,000 cows. Overall, the national herd in-creased by 2.9% or 138,600 cows.

Indofood buys Danone IndonesiaIndofood CBP Sukses Mak-mur, Indonesia’s biggest maker of instant noodles, has purchased 100% of French dairy giant Danone’s Dairy Indonesia business. This will include the trade-mark of the Milkuat milk bev-erage and all the shares. The 250 billionn rupiah (€16.4 million) buy was completed at the end of 2014.

Chinese imports dipNew Zealand dairy giant Fonterra’s published figures have shown a decrease of 12.6% for Chinese dairy im-ports year on year, according to the company. WMP fell by 50% in September. The country is said to be buying less due to drawing down of current stocks. China pur-chases about two thirds of the world’s trade in WMP and more than a third of the global fresh milk shipments. Experts say this will no doubt depress the global dairy pric-es further.

Moving dairyReportstack has a new re-port, Global Dairy Products Transportation Market 2015-2019, which notes one of the trends is the increased use of intermodal transportation. The global market is expect-ed to witness a CAGR of 8.59% during 2014-2019.

IN BRIEF

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Milk science finds answersto nutrition concerns

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