Cream of the crop: Taranaki Fonterra site wins at Fonterra Best Site Cup Awards

Fonterra Kapuni won the Speciality Plant Award at Fonterra's Best Site Cup Awards earlier this month.

A Taranaki Fonterra site is leading the way in specialty products, winning an accolade at Fonterra’s Best Site Cup Awards.

The awards, now in their 18th year, are held annually to celebrate the successes of Fonterra’s manufacturing sites across the country.

They recognise the top-performing sites based on criteria such as efficiency, quality, customer service, innovation and sustainability.

On Thursday, June 20, Fonterra Kapuni received the Best Specialty Plant Award, an award dedicated to the co-op’s specialty product manufacturing sites.

Built in 1948, Fonterra’s Kapuni site is located 20 minutes from Hāwera.

Fonterra Kapuni’s site operations manager Raymond Moffitt said the award was an amazing achievement.

“The award reflects all the hard work and dedication of the staff at Kapuni. Our team had some challenges at the start of the season with a high volume of ingredients. Being able to finish with record production and achieving all metrics across efficiency, quality and sustainability shows the outstanding work done by everyone on site.”

In the past, the site was the 2022 runner-up for the Quality Cup, a finalist for the People Cup in 2021, a finalist for Best Medium Site Cup and the winner of the Best Consumer and Foodservice Cup and Best People Cup in 2019.

In 2023, the site produced 54,000MT of pharmaceutical and nutritional lactose, which was exported all over the world.

Kapuni is also recognised for its excellent hazard management reporting, as well as great improvement against energy performance and waste-to-landfill targets.

The awards evening brought together nearly 200 site representatives with 21 awards. Fonterra’s director of manufacturing Alan Van Der Nagel said the awards recognised and celebrated great work.

“Best Site Cup Awards are all about celebrating the amazing work our teams do every day and everything we’ve achieved together. The awards show how dedicated everyone is to ongoing improvement, efficiency and staying sustainable, and it’s fantastic to see our sites getting the recognition they deserve for all their hard work and commitment over the past year.”