Tetra Pak opens €25m cheese production centre in Poland

Tetra Pak has announced the opening of its €25 million site in Poland, in a move to boost cheese production solutions and help its customers meet the growing consumer demand.

The new centre has full scale engineering facilities, including cheese making process design, mechanical, automation and electrical engineering. The site also offers facilities for sales and for the manufacturing of process solutions itself.

Tetra Pak claims its investment in the 12,000 square foot facility will double its cheese-making solution capacity in the country and allow extensive equipment testing.

Located in Olszytn, north-eastern Poland, the cheese production centre will employ over 350 workers across engineering, production and business management.

Ola Elmqvist, executive vice president of Processing Solutions & Equipment at Tetra Pak said: “As the only company able to deliver a completely seamless integrated solution for cheese production, this investment demonstrates our commitment to help customers meet rapidly changing consumer demands and capture emerging growth opportunities.”

According to Tetra Pak, the overall global cheese market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 2.3%, largely due to semi-hard cheese and mozzarella demand. With its new centre, Tetra Pak aims to support customers in their development of new production methods and processes that meet trends for cheese as an ingredient, on-the-go snack and high protein diet addition.

Elmqvist added: “One of the main reasons we chose Olsztyn is its excellent location in the heart of a region with a great dairy tradition and excellent food engineering talent base. This means we’re perfectly placed to serve not only our customers in Poland but also wider Europe.”

As part of its commitment to environmental sustainability and goal to minimise its environmental footprint, the site has a fully automatic ‘weather control’ system that manages ventilation and sunlight, and a rainwater collection system that supplies water for site maintenance.

Earlier this year, Tetra Pak opened an aseptic carton packaging factory in Vietnam following an investment of €120 million.