The move is to enable the company to process milk from local dairy farmers into long-life yogurt drinks. The project, part of the Dairy Development Programme, aims to support local farmers to increase their milk production, improve the quality of the milk and offer them access to the market.
Jeroen Elfers, corporate director dairy development and milk streams at FrieslandCampina, said, “With this mobile dairy plant we help thousands of local Nigerian farmers by ensuring the sales of their milk and, consequently, their income. We are also creating jobs and provide the population with nutritious and affordable dairy products. In this way, we are cooperating with the Nigerian government in providing food for the rapidly growing population.”
The plant consists of five interlinked containers and was built by Dutch companies Scherjon Dairy Equipment and Onesto Construction. The five 40 ft containers will soon be shipped to Nigeria. As soon as the containers arrive at their destination, they will be interlinked, and the yogurt production can begin.
Milk from local dairy farmers is used for the yogurt. FrieslandCampina exports dairy products and semi-finished products from the Netherlands, and produces dairy products using milk from local dairy farmers in Nigeria.
The new yogurt plant will start by processing 1.8m kilograms of milk and can produce more than 18m pouches of drinking yogurt annually. The processing capacity can rapidly be scaled up. FrieslandCampina said it expects to put the plant into use in the first quarter of 2022 in Nigeria.
FrieslandCampina has had its own dairy plant in Nigeria since 1974, FrieslandCampina WAMCO (West Africa Milk Company). Peak is the best-known brand of FrieslandCampina in Nigeria. In 2020, FrieslandCampina acquired the dairy company Nutricima and with this obtained a second processing location in southwest Nigeria and became the owner of, among others, the NuNu brand.