The South Australian Government has awarded Beston Global Food Company (BFC) a $2.5 million regional development grant to develop a new cutting-edge cheese processing facility as part of the Beston Pure Foods operations at Murray Bridge, SA.
The planned expansion, which will cost a total of $25 million, will increase the company’s cheddar making capacity and expand the range of cheeses to include Mozzarella, Gruyere and Parmesan, as well as a range of soft cream and white mould cheeses.
BFC Chairman Roger Sexton said the expansion was part of the company’s strategy to become a producer of a diverse range of high end, premium dairy products for both local and export markets and to boost the dairy industry in SA.
“The objective of the new facility is to produce cheeses which are import replacing, thereby creating a demand for additional milk from dairy farmers in South Australia,” Dr Sexton said.
“Working in conjunction with well-established local and national cheese distributors we also intend to build an incubation centre as part of the project whereby newly qualified cheesemakers can experiment with new cheese varieties in a way that meets both our own production requirements as well as the commercial requirements of distributors.”
BFC CEO Sean Ebert said the SA grant award “recognised the important role” which the company was playing to boost high value food production.
“The project to expand production of Beston Pure Foods at Murray Bridge has been developed in response to customer demand and, importantly, satisfies all of our company’s financial benchmarks and investment criteria.”
The government grant is conditional on BFC obtaining local council and other regulatory approvals for the development.
