Local investor eyes ultramodern powder milk factory

COME March this year, Tanzania might get the first powder milk plant after a potential local investor in the dairy sub-sector expressed interest in constructing an ultramodern factory for processing the vital product.

For years, Tanzania has been compelled to spend millions of monies to import powder milk from abroad due to absence of relevant technology within the country, especially infant technology.

Powdered milk, also called milk powder, dried milk or dry milk is a manufactured dairy product made by evaporating milk to dryness.

One purpose of drying milk is to preserve it; milk powder has a far longer shelf life than liquid milk and does not need to be refrigerated, due to its low moisture content.

The skimmed milk has the same nutrition as fresh milk and it provides bone-building nutrients such as protein, calcium, vitamin D and vitamin A.

During an interview with the ‘Daily News’, the registrar of Tanzania Dairy Board (TDB), Dr George Msalya said Tanzania was spending approximately 640m/- weekly and 15bn/-annually, to import milk products (including powder milk) due to shortage of the needed technology within the country.

“The envisaged plant will play a meaningful role in helping to develop milk production sub-sector in Tanzania, but also the factory which is currently under construction in Iringa region will help the government to save a total of 640m/- that is being used weekly to import milk products from overseas,” he unveiled.

Apart from requiring financial capital to install a powdered milk processing plant which is more than 1bn/-, running the kind of factory also requires availability of enough fresh milk because one litre of powder milk is produced from eight litres of fresh milk, according to TDB’s registrar.

Moreover, Dr Msalya said poor investment in Ultra-high temperature processing (UHT) technology had for years denied the country an opportunity to benefit from the milk sub-sector, including exporting milk products to potential international markets.

According to him, there were only five factories in Tanzania that have installed UHT technology facilities, which are Azam Milk, Tanga Fresh Limited, Milkcom, ASAS Dairies and Galaxy Food- a situation which thwarts processing capacity and quality in the country in both private and public sector factories.

“UHT is a food processing technology that sterilises liquid food, most commonly milk, by heating it above 135 °C, over a very short period of time– only two to five seconds – to kill microbial spores,” he said.

He detailed that the available milk factories had installed maximum capacity to process 871,700 liters in a day, but due to several challenges –including low pace in UHT technology- the plants were only processing 207,050 (equivalent to 25 percent).

“Despite being endowed with all potential needs to improve performance of the dairy sub-sector, the country still lags behind when it comes to production and processing of milk products due to poor investment in modern-technologies as well as crossbreed dairy cattle.