Ornua has invested €40m ($42.2m) in a dairy plant in Ireland to support growth in its global Kerrygold brand.
The cash has been deployed at the cooperative’s Kerrygold Park facility located in the town of Mitchelstown, County Cork, as the co-op seeks to drive the brand’s sales to €2bn in markets at home and abroad.
With annual sales of around €3.4bn, Dublin-headquartered Ornua said the investment will increase production of cream by 80,000 tonnes a year, or one million packs a day, and support exports to the US, where the company claims Kerrygold is the second-most popular dairy brand.
Ornua said the Kerrygold Park factory is equipped with two butter churns and ten packaging lines, with products shipped to 60 markets. The investment includes an undisclosed amount of funding from the government’s Enterprise Ireland development scheme and will expand the workforce by 30 to 180.
Aidan O’Driscoll, Ornua’s chairman, said: “For the past 60 years, Kerrygold has proudly brought the unique taste of Irish grass-fed dairy to the world on behalf of Ornua’s member cooperatives and the 14,000 dairy farming families they represent.
“We are also passionate about growing the brand’s global status further and focused on safeguarding the value it returns to the Irish dairy sector through the premiumisation of Irish dairy.”
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Ornua added that the investment in the Mitchelstown plant will also “strengthen the routes to high-value markets” for the Kerrygold brand.
The co-op has yet to respond to Just Food asking for an explanation behind that objective, to confirm the current sales for the Kerrygold brand and for fuller details on what the plant investment entails.
Jenny Melia, an executive director at Enterprise Ireland, said: “Enterprise Ireland is committed to supporting companies like Ornua to increase their level of innovation, improve their competitiveness and expand their global footprint, with the ultimate goal of delivering export growth for Ireland.”
