SAY CHEESE
Fonterra’s Collingwood Street Eltham, Taranaki, plant is a high-tech cheese production Mecca – the largest consumer and cheese manufacturing plant in Australasia. It produces 80,000 tonnes of cut, shredded, processed and sliced cheese for a range of local and multi-national customers including McDonald’s, Burger King and Subway.
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he Collingwood Street site was established in the late 1980s and now operates 24 hours a day, 50 weeks of the year. Production has increased due to a major expansion in its sliceon-slice cheese plant capabilities. Even though the facility produces enough sliced cheese each year to cover three billion cheese burgers, the range of cheese products is tailored to meet each customer’s specifications. From specific packaging and presentation to suit each individual quick service restaurant brand, to the specialist melty cheese found in Sizzler Sausages. They shred the frozen mozzarella for Pizza Hut and Dominoes products, as well as the individually wrapped cheese slices found
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in our grocery outlets. There are more than 275 individual specifications the Collingwood Street team are required to meet for their customers. Not only is the range of products and list of customers long, the production scale is staggering – one machine processes 1.5 tonnes of cheese per hour and can produce up to 2,000 individually wrapped slices of cheese per minute. With numbers like that it’s not surprising that 80 per cent of the cheese that’s processed at the Eltham plant is exported. People in more than 50 countries around the world enjoy Fonterra’s Taranaki cheese in their burgers, sandwiches and pizzas.