Wellington
It may seem counter-intuitive that a wildly competing world dairy industry got together inAuckland to collaborate, but without such round-table discussions, there would be no foundation onwhich to build innovative products and services in the sector and many would be almost impossible toverify.
The whole International
Dairy Federation/World DairySummit
event recently held in Auckland is pre-competitive or non-competitive says the NewZealand president of the IDF,
“The industry comes together where we need to form a consensus,” he says. This might be ondeveloping standard methods to analyse a component, or develop a new food standard. That might bethat a composition of a particular dairy food, or food product containing a dairy a specificquantity of a dairy component.
“Then individual countries or companies can use their own proprietary techniques, their ownintellectual property to occupy that space with their own products or services.”
Hill says such technically related matters occupy the full value chain from feed to fork, andeven beyond that as claims relating to nutritional and health aspects of dairy food.
“The IDF literally has dozens of projects along the entire chain,” he says. In order tocompare products from different companies and countries, aspects such as animal health standards,food standards, carbon footprint analysis or life cycle analysis need to have a common base or elsethey would be meaningless. For example, stating the protein levels of a dairy product based ondifferent methods of measuring that protein, would be relatively worthless.
“If we have a common understanding and collaboration on the ultimate nutritional values indairy food, then we can compete with different products and services in the value chain,” Hillsays