Fonterra employs a small army of chefs - here’s what they do

Sunday, 1 June 2025

Fonterra employs an army of chefs.

It has around 70 all up, with 51 in China where they work out of Fonterra’s six “application centres”, tasked with showing local chefs how they can use Fonterra’s dairy ingredients in their restaurants and cafes.

Other Fonterra chefs are doing their bit to encourage dairy use in cuisine in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

But the dairy giant, which is flying high on dairy demand and high milk prices, also has research chefs in Auckland and at the Fonterra Research and Development Centre (FRDC) in Palmerston North, reputed to be this country’s most PhD-dense town.

Simon Davey is a research chef at the FRDC. He’s a specialist pastry chef, who Fonterra poached from the Hilton Hotels group, where he was an executive pastry chef in Bangkok.

His hotel job was a high-stress, long hours role: “Always on edge. Checking emails like a maniac.”

Days started at 9am, and ended at 11pm. He enjoyed it, but such cheffing takes its toll.

“You don’t realise until your family start wondering where you are,” Davey says.

The kitchen in which Davey works these days isn’t so much a kitchen as a laboratory, and it’s a calm place to work. White coats, hairnets and hand sanitiser are the rule.

Davey is involved in helping test and develop new products for Fonterra, including cooking up things for Fonterra’s citizen’s tasting panel, who taste-test new products.

But the lion’s share of his role involves performance-testing existing Fonterra products by cooking with them, something that makes him popular among colleagues, especially on “croissant day” at the FRDC, when Davey is test-cooking with butter.

It’s to Davey that Fonterra turns when it needs to know whether its creams hold their shape and colour for 24 hours when whipped and set upon cakes, or whether they can withstand the jostling of a courier delivery, and still arrive looking good.

There’s shelf-life testing to be done. How does a tetra-packed UHT cream perform after three, six, or nine months?

He’s also involved in monitoring how Fonterra products from different dairy plants compare.

“South Island cream and Waikato cream are from different plants [factories], and have fundamental differences just from what the cows eat,” Davey says.

There has long been interest in how Fonterra’s milk, cream, and other dairy foods are “manufactured”, but also trade secrecy.

At a visit by reporters to FRDC on Monday, Pierre Venter, Fonterra’s director for research and development, was asked about the composition of its successful Easy Bakery UHT cream, which is going gangbusters in China, Fonterra’s single biggest market.

He would not reveal it, citing commercial sensitivity.

Milk is the only ingredient in milk, but milk varies from region to region, and season to season, so Fonterra standardises its milk, adding or removing elements to ensure it is the same.

It’s all milk, but it’s not the stuff exactly as it comes out of the cow. The same goes for Fonterra’s cream.

In China there is an intense desire for innovation in food, says Davey.

There’s also been a huge rise in the popularity of dairy, largely as a result of a Communist Party push to lift dairy consumption to improve the health, height and strength of the population.

Dairy has moved from being a relatively rare luxury to becoming a pantry staple, and a larger part of people’s diets, in a decade and a half.

In a bid to get its products used widely by chefs and food service businesses, Fonterra has invested in six “application” centres in China, the latest one being sited in Wuhan.

It’s from these centres Fonterra’s China-based chefs work. Some are specialists focusing solely on one of the most popular food types in Asia that use dairy ingredients such as buns, cakes, cream cheese, and drinks.

Fonterra’s chefs were at work demonstrating recipes at the giant Bakery China 2025 trade show in Shanghai earlier this month, an event that dwarfs events held in New Zealand or Australia, with 330,000m² of show space, which is around 10 times the size of the New Zealand International Convention Centre soon to open in Auckland.

Fonterra’s latest hero product in China and Korea whimsically named Cheddar-san. Sold in a 20kg blocks, it has been launched in Asia as an ingredient for the food service industry.

Richard Allen, Fonterra’s president for global Ingredients, introduced Cheddar-san to media at a lunch in Auckland on May 8 just before China Bakery 2025 opened.

“We have been able to develop technology that means this cheddar, which is typically only somewhere between four to eight months old, develops the same flavour profile as Parmesan,” he said.

Hence the name Cheddar-san, though the play on words also captures the Japanese honorific “san”, which is added to people’s names to show respect.

Because it has to spend less time maturing, it costs less to make, and can be sold at an attractive price.

Hitting that lower price point unlocked a lot of value for Fonterra’s customers, Allen said.

The culture and enzymes came from the FRDC in Palmerston North.

Pizzas are growing in popularity in China, although many Chinese people harbour the view that the country is actually where pizza was born, and passed onto Italians through adventures on the Silk Road ‒ much like the ‘origin of spaghetti’ theory. Either way, Fonterra’s cheese is now used, the dairy co-operative believes, on about half of all pizzas made and consumed in China, many of which are topped with ingredients rarely seen on New Zealand pizzas including the acrid-smelling durian fruit.

It’s the Chinese chefs whose task it is to spread the message about Cheddar-san with their cooking demonstrations and recipes.

“China has been the backbone of the New Zealand dairy industry for some time. It’s about 30% of our total global business,” Allen said.

One day Cheddar-san could become a consumer product, perhaps even available in New Zealand.

But that will be up for Fonterra’s consumer brand business to decide, and it may not even be owned by Fonterra in the future, as the company looks float it on the NZX sharemarket, or sell it off completely.