Fonterra to sell off China JV farms

The New Zealand dairy major says it remains committed to the Chinese market despite its latest disposal there.

 

New Zealand dairy heavyweight Fonterra said it remains committed to the Chinese market despite it agreeing the sale of its two joint venture farms in the country.

The farms in Shandong province will be sold to Singapore-based AustAsia Investment Holdings for US$115.5m with the transaction expected to complete by the end of this month.

Fonterra, which owns the farms with a joint venture partner, has a 51% stake in the business and will receive NZD88m (US$62.3m) in total asset sale proceeds.

The sell-off follow the cooperative’s announcement last October that it was selling its two wholly-owned China farming hubs in Shanxi and Hebei provinces to Inner Mongolia Youran Dairy in April for NZD552m.

Fonterra CEO Miles Hurrell said the latest disposals align to its strategy of prioritising New Zealand milk.

“The sale of the JV farms allows us to focus even more on our farmer owners’ milk and follows the sale of our two wholly-owned China farming hubs earlier this year,” he said.

But he added: “Greater China continues to be one of our most important strategic markets. We remain committed to our China business, bringing the goodness of New Zealand milk to Chinese customers in innovative ways and partnering with local Chinese companies to do so.

“We are well placed to continue to grow our business in Greater China,”Fonterra, the world’s largest dairy exporter, has been criticised by its farmer-shareholders for its overseas ventures.

The dairy group revealed three months ago that it had further reduced its stake in China infant-formula joint venture Beingmate. At one stage it had a 19% share in the venture but in March this was reduced to 2.82% with Fonterra saying it will have exited the JV entirely by the the end of its financial year.

Fonterra described the results of the joint venture as “disappointing”.

Child slavery claims against Nestle, Cargill dismissed by US court

Nestlé and Cargill have won the day in a court ruling over child slavery in west Africa.

 

The US Supreme Court has reportedly dismissed a lawsuit accusing the US division of Swiss food giant Nestlé and ingredients supplier Cargill of child slavery at Ivory Coast cocoa farms.

The majority ruling was delivered yesterday (17 June) by Justice Clarence Thomas, Reuters reported. That reversed a lower-court ruling that permitted a lawsuit to be filed in 2005 against the two companies by six former cocoa farm workers from Mali, who claim they were illegally trafficked when still children to the Ivory Coast.

According to the news agency, the court ruled the claim could not be brought under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows non-US citizens to seek damages in American courts in certain instances, because the plaintiffs did not show any of the relevant conduct took place within the US.

“Nearly all the conduct that they say aided and abetted forced labour – providing training, fertiliser tools, and cash to overseas farms – occurred in Ivory Coast,” Reuters reported Thomas as saying in his verdict.

A Nestlé spokesperson was reported as saying: “Nestlé never engaged in the egregious child labour alleged in this suit, and we remain unwavering in our dedication to combating child labour in the cocoa industry.”

Meanwhile, Cargill responded to Just Food’s request for comment with a statement, which read: “The Supreme Court’s ruling today affirms Cargill’s analysis of the law and confirms this suit has no basis to proceed.”

It continued: “Cargill’s work to keep child labour out of the cocoa supply chain is unwavering. We do not tolerate the use of child labour in our operations or supply chains and we are working every day to prevent it. We will continue to focus on the root causes, including poverty and lack of education access. Our mission is to drive long-lasting change in cocoa communities and to lift up the families that rely on cocoa for their income.”

Paul Hoffman, the lawyer representing the six plaintiffs, told Reuters he intends to refile the lawsuit with more ‘detailed allegations on conduct’ that he said took place in the US.

Food giants sign up to new Foundation Earth eco-labelling scheme

The scheme is intended to inform consumers' choices about the environmental impact of the products they are buying.

 

A group of food manufacturers and retailers have signed up for a new project, Foundation Earth, which will see front-of-pack labels put on products to give an indication of environmental impact.

The initiative was the brainchild of the late UK food entrepreneur Denis Lynn, who set up UK meat group Finnebrogue Artisan. He died in a quadbike accident last month.

Through a pilot launch this autumn, non-profit organisation Foundation Earth will issue front-of-pack eco-scores on food and drink products. The labels will rate a product’s environmental credentials using a traffic-light scoring system devised by the consultancy Mondra.

The system behind the labels looks at farming, processing, packaging and transport. It assesses the environmental impact of a product based upon carbon (49% weighted), water usage (17%), water pollution (17%) and biodiversity loss (17%).

In parallel to the pilot will be a nine-month research and development programme, funded by Nestlé, that will combine the Mondra method with a system devised by an EU-funded consortium of Belgium’s Leuven University and Spanish research agency AZTI.

The consortium is brought together under the auspices of the European Commission’s food innovation initiative EIT Food. The aim of the programme is to prepare Foundation Earth for a Europe-wide roll-out in 2022.

“The Mondra and EIT systems are unique globally, in that they both allow two products of the same type to be compared on their individual merits via a complete product life cycle analysis, as opposed to simply using secondary data to estimate the environmental impact of an entire product group,” Jago Pearson, chief strategy officer at Finnebrogue, told Just Food.

Under the system, generic chicken nuggets would get a B label and blueberries a C, but the scores for individual products will vary depending on production methods.

Meat-free bacon start-up Hooray Foods secures additional seed funds

Hooray Foods' new financing takes the US start-up's funding to date to US$4m.

 

Meat-free bacon start-up Hooray Foods in San Francisco has secured additional seed financing to scale up production.

The US$2m investment was led by New York-based venture-capital fund Evolution VC Partners, whose founder and CEO Gregg Smith will join the Hooray Foods’ board of directors. It was joined in the round by Gaingels, an investor also located in New York, and Sand Hill Angels, a group of angel investors in Silicon Valley. The investment split was not disclosed.

Hooray Foods was founded by Sri Artham in 2019 and secured its first major retail listing last November, with its products now stocked in more than 300 Whole Foods Market stores in the US. The business won seed funding in 2020 from plant-based investor Stray Dog Capital, US venture fund that also contributed to the company’s pre-seed financing in 2019.

The Glasswall Syndicate, a group of venture capitalists, foundations, trusts, non-profit organisations and individual investors in Kansas City, also participated in that round. Glasswall is managed by Stray Dog Capital’s Macy Marriott.

Announcing the additional seed finance, Hooray Foods said it has now received about $4m in total funding.

It will use some of the latest cash round to “improve” its plant-based bacon, which is produced using “proprietary fat encapsulation techniques”. Ingredients include coconut oil, rice flour, tapioca starch, umami seasoning, maple syrup, salt and beet juice concentrate. The products are allergen-free and are free-from soy, nitrites and hormones.