Food and beverage company Lake Foods, a division of South African chemicals group AECI, has launched a new dairy application centre in Cape Town.

The centre will assist customers with product innovation and development, as well as product improvements.

Lake Foods is the exclusive representative for international manufacturers and suppliers of speciality ingredients and commodities and offers products and services to the bakery, beverage, dairy, health and nutrition, meat, poultry and wine industries.

These products include bacterial cultures, enzymes, natural colours, testing systems, phosphates, stabilisers, emulsifiers, baking powders, brines, spice blends and marinades.

The centre is a partnership with global bioscience company Christian Hansen, which provides financial backing for AECI at the Lake Foods facility. The centre will enable Christian Hansen to reinforce its position in Africa, which is one of its growth markets, alongside that of India and China.

Christian Hansen will seek to develop, for the local and export markets, health-focused methods and innovations to not only reduce the sugar and fat content in certain dairy products but also provide lactose and preservative-free products, while keeping the “same great taste”, Christian Hansen executive VP Jacob Vishof Paulsen told delegates attending the opening ceremony.

There are other Christian Hansen-led application centres in Russia, India and Australia, but this month’s event marked the company’s “entrance into Africa”.

Christian Hansen dairy technical manager Lara Aylward explained that the centre would be used to replicate household conditions for dairy products, such as yogurt, so that the company was able to support its customers throughout the product development life cycle with capacity in research and development (in terms of shelf life, for example), manufacturing, packaging and logistics.

This was critical, considering that the one-third of the world’s food that was discarded could be used to feed the hungry, particularly in regions such as Africa, where poverty remained a big socioeconomic challenge.

The centre was not yet a fully fledged production facility but was, for the time being, focusing on batch processing, AECI food and beverage MD Roger Falck told Engineering News during a recent visit.

While the equipment itself could handle any number of projects, he explained, each person in the centre would have the capacity to manage one end-to-end project a week, “which is a fairly quick turnaround time”.

Right now, the centre only had one individual working within it, namely Aylward, but, resources permitting, AECI would look to expand the facility’s capacity in future, Falck added.

AECI, which is largely known for its explosives and chemicals specialities, previously identified food and beverage as a strategic growth pillar, which is where Lake Foods is positioned.

The company’s other pillars include mining solutions, water and process, plant and animal health and chemicals.