Maintenance time for Fonterra’s manufacturing sites

Fonterra's Edendale plant in Southland is undergoing maintenance. Photo / Fonterra

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It’s time now to talk to the team at Fonterra, and today The Country Sport Breakfast’s Brian Kelly is joined by Aaron Goldsbury, General Manager of Engineering at Fonterra.

Kelly asked “It’s wintertime now and I know milking has stopped at some dairy farms. Have Fonterra’s manufacturing sites also entered the off-season period?”

“This time of the year is what we normally call winter shut time and it commences in June to the beginning of August and many of our 26 manufacturing sites stop processing milk and are closed for annual winter maintenance” Goldsbury said.

“This year, we’re spending about $56m to maintain over 600,000 assets and this will take about 300,000 labour hours, involving mechanical, electrical, building and equipment specialists, who will be on sites every week until the end of July.

“We also complete 150 capital projects during the winter period and as you can imagine getting all this work done takes a lot of effort to manage.”

“That sounds like a huge amount of work, but maintenance must be very important to make sure the sites are ready for the next season,” Kelly asked.

Goldsbury said each season, Fonterra collected about 17,800 million litres of raw milk from its farmers and its sites run at full capacity for about 10 months a year, working hard to process and turn this milk into around 2.5 million tonnes of product for over 120 markets.

“That doesn’t give us much downtime, so the maintenance undertaken during this time is critical to ensure product quality and efficiency for the next season.”

Goldsbury said there were some major projects happening on sites.

“Our $24b of assets across our 27 manufacturing sites are aging, with an average age of over 30 years, so Fonterra is focusing on managing the condition of these assets so they can keep operating for many years to come.

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“For instance, they are doing some major maintenance on our critical powder plant buildings at Clandeboye, Edendale and Te Rapa to ensure they provide a clean environment for making safe food.”

Goldsbury said Fonterra had several other projects underway to deliver on its decarbonisation goals and exit coal in the South Island, including installing its first 20MW electric boiler at the Edendale site in Southland.