Fonterra still buoyant despite slight drop in net profit to $1.09b
Dairy co-operative Fonterra has reported a slight drop in full year net profit, but still made more than a billion dollars with revenue up 15 percent.
Chief executive Miles Hurrell said the full year ended July had been one of the Co-op’s strongest years yet, with the current year positioned to deliver another positive result for shareholders.
How many times do I have to spell this out to you sleepy hobbits?
We created a monopoly in the form of Fonterra to maximise price negotiations on the global market, but the flipside of that is that me as a consumer in NZ, for a product made in NZ, I’m competing with 500 million middle class Chinese who want this product.
NZ only has a population of 5million, we can never compete for price against 500million middle class Chinese.
Why should we be forced to pay the same price as the Chinese Middle Class can afford?
The Chinese Middle Class is forecast to grow to 787 million!
On top of that, this butter is created by a cow which takes water, pollutes water and generates climate warming emissions.
So this product, that I’ve already paid an environmental price in the manufacturing of, also costs me an arm and a leg price wise, because I’m competing with 500million middle class Chinese?
Why are we paying a price that is imposed upon us by a middle class market that is many times larger than our total population?
Also consider the impact of synthetic milk production that would cripple our economy overnight!
How close is research to synthetic milk powder?
Current progress
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Precision fermentation: Companies like Perfect Day (US), Imagindairy (Israel), and Remilk (Israel) are already producing dairy proteins (casein, whey) using genetically engineered microbes. These proteins are identical to those in cow’s milk.
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Pilot products: Ice cream, cheese, and yoghurts using synthetic milk proteins are already on the market in limited quantities.
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Milk powder challenge:
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Fresh liquid milk analogues are progressing faster because they need fewer processing steps.
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Milk powder requires scale and drying infrastructure — you need not just proteins but fats, sugars (lactose alternatives), and minerals in the right balance, then spray-dry them without losing functionality.
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As of 2025, no company has achieved full commercial-scale milk powder equivalents suitable for use in all the same applications (e.g., infant formula, bakery, confectionery).
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Timeframe estimates
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Industry analysts predict proof-of-concept synthetic milk powders within 3–5 years, but mass-scale, cost-competitive production is probably 10+ years away.
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Bottlenecks: scaling fermentation vats, energy cost of spray drying, regulatory approvals, and consumer acceptance.
Dairy is a sunset industry and our decision to destroy the brands and sell them off means we are simply basic bitch milk powder producers and we lose all our edge the moment synthetic dairy can replace organic milk powder.
Our basic bitch milk powder is used as an ingredient filler for the heavily manufactured food industry, a food industry that produces fat, sugar and salt laden crap food.
Do you all honestly believe hand on heart that that food industry will draw a line in the sand for our organic basic bitch milk powder?
How stupid is you?
Why have we allowed the corporates to take the kai from our nation and make us compete against far larger markets who will pay more than the domestic population in NZ can afford?
I’m sick of Fonterra’s excuses.
We created a Monopoly for them and these greedy fucks have trashed their social contract with Kiwis!
Get off your knees Kiwi, the Dairy Farmer ain’t your mate!
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Funny how the left now yearns for genetically engineered food ingredients when they were so dead against this in the late 90s and early 2000s – Monsanto anybody?
What a moronic comment – did you even read the post? No one is celebrating GE, the post is pointing out the inevitability of that while dickhead dairy farmer apologists like you scream the left want GE now. You make a lot of false claims and disingenuous comments Frank, but this one was pitiful even for you
I’m yawning not yearning at your lame comment Frank. There is nothing wrong with farming & producing food but there are seriously impactful wrongs with how we farm and produce said food. 11.3 mg/L Nitrogen laced water anyone? You Frank? I bet John Key, Jacqueline Rowarth & their Dairy lobbyist buddies all have good filtration systems for their Whanau’s eh. And nobody talk’s about the social harm’s of dairying. Meth is rife on quite a few of these “managed” farms. I know of one mega dairy farming family on the West Coast who had workers with P-Labs in their farm houses. I was told by a friend that when the Dairy Price dropped in 2014/2015 that their Tanker Driver son went to collect milk and found the share milker hanging in the dairy shed. And he wasn’t the only suicide over that period due to being over leveraged thanks’ to the foreign banks trapping unwary gold/milk rush greed. Nothing wrong with farming it’s how we farm. That’s what matter’s and are our people, Tangata Whenua, Tangata Tiriti & environment benefitting overall ? Or not?
Monsanto killed themselves – people didn’t want the terminator gene or plants producing their own poisons. GE is a promising technology if handled responsibly – but resisting labelling showed Monsanto did not choose to be responsible. They set their own cause back 20 years.
Oh Frank, you are hilarious. You start with “Funny how the left”. Your argument fell over right there. Clearly you aren’t mature enough to debate the article and simply are devoid of any ability to discuss a topic without placing labels on people. Should we disqualify anything you say because you are “right wing”?
I’ve stopped buying butter on principle, I have been watching the body language & faces of ordinary everyday kiwi’s in the supermarket duopolies license to print money halls of power. The feeling I come away with is depression in the face of severe impacts due to the cost of living. Seeing pasta, rice, commercial ultra processed bread going into families/whanau’s trolleys. The scared look on some people’s faces that they won’t be able to afford what they have in their trollies and basket’s. And yet we apparently produce enough food to feed 40 million? And a lot of that excess is produced at the cost to our environment/whenua.
The worst day in the greedy non supermarket was seeing a woman with a bandana on because her hair had fallen out from the chemo she was receiving she carried a basket and was putting back the powdered potatoes she wanted to buy, this was heartbreaking as she only had about 6 items in her basket. Some of your reader’s & commenters on here will shrug their shoulders & close their cold libertarian, conservative hearts. Maybe she should have worked harder & provided for herself better? It’s dog eat woman, man & child now. Better living everyone.
Fonterra pollute the environment and cheat the people with cheap claims and expensive products. All they had left was their economic base, but they offloaded their assets as well (in reality NZ’s assets). In summary they are failing local business, environment and people. And I’m guessing the people of NZ couldn’t give a shit about Fonterra’s global fairytale either.
If alt dairy products leads to cheaper steaks…bring it on! NOM NOM
I remember a number of dodgy management who used to work for Telecom back in the day. These guys were unscrupulous to borderline white collar crime with their profit maximizing practises that they were constantly running in with the telco commerce commission. A lot of these corporate pirates jumped ship like rats after a big shake up with restructuring and guess where a lot of them ended up. Big fat cushy jobs at Fonterra.
i wonder if any of these dairy farmers intend to pay back the millions that Jacinda invested to save their sorry arses by eliminating the MICO PLASMA BOVIS virus that would have wiped them all out had she adopted the national party plan to be hands off and let the market take care of it .Those millions would be invaluable to willis as she stumbles into a bigger pile of cow shit destroying the Whenua .
Fonterra only cares about its 11000 share holders as it should .So why would they give a toss about the other 5 million plus .But a couple of years from now when the price has crashed ,farms are flooded or a drought hits they will be wanting the 5 million to bail them out .