Moon Lake’s sister company VAN Dairy will start exporting organic UHT milk and yoghurt to China by the middle of the year.
Two companies will manufacture VAN Dairy-branded UHT milk and yoghurt products.
The brand is already known in China, with VAN Milk on shelves in Green Mart, OLE, BLT and Hema stores.
VAN Milk strengthened its Chinese presence by opening offices in four key cities – Shanghai, Beijing, Ningbo and Hangzhou – in 2017, Moon Lake chairman Mr Xianfeng Lu said.
“Our growing brand and profile in China is great news for everyone – for our farmers in Tasmania, our customers in China, and everyone in between who has worked to build this important link, bringing fresh, pure Tasmanian milk to the consumers who need and demand it,” Mr Xianfeng Lu said today.
More dairy products are also in development, with plans to launch them in the second half of 2018.
Moon Lake managing director Sean Shwe said the company was close to achieving full Chinese organic farm certification for three of its dairy farms.
“The road to organic farm certification is, justifiably, a long and complex one, but thanks to our local team and some serious tree planting, full Chinese certification for VAN Dairy is progressing quickly and we are hopeful it can be achieved at two of the three farms by July 2018, and the third farm a bit later on,” he said.
The company is also on track to achieve Australian certification within the next two years.
Moon Lake announced it was planting more than 6000 native trees and shrubs to provide a buffer for three of its North-West Tasmanian dairy farms, in collaboration with Cradle Coast NRM.
These dairies will create a commercial organic farm business of about 1650 cows on almost 790 hectares, doubling the annual production of organic milk in Tasmania to 7.5 million litres.
Organic certification is part of Moon Lake’s strategy to create value-added products with high farm returns for clean and safe milk.
