This report covers the market for liquid milk in China. Growing incomes, availability and health awareness are gradually overcoming a traditional aversion to dairy products propelling the liquid manufacturing and sales market in China.
Despite not being a traditional food product in China, dairy products are emerging as one of the fastest growing sectors of the market in China at the moment. There are any number of reasons for this – calcium awareness, a growing taste for western products, improved earnings, increased availability – amongst them. Not least is the presence of foreign dairy companies, both as active importers in to the market and latterly as manufacturers in China. The New Zealand Dairy Board was so pleased with import success that it has now opened a factory. Walls and Nestlé have come to dominate the ice cream and Popsicle markets due to lack of local competition. There are currently approximately 1,000 dairy enterprises in China, of which 90% have a capacity of processing less than 100 tons of fresh milk daily. Many dairy farms have increasingly outdated equipment and technology despite growing levels of investment and this is meaning that they are losing out to foreign funded joint ventures and imports.