Beston Global Food Company (BFC) has formed a strategic alliance with leading Australian Cheese distributor, the Washed Rind Group (WRG).
The deal means WRG will distribute cheddar and other cheeses currently produced at Beston Pure Foods factory at Murray Bridge, South Australia; and purchase and age certain cheeses manufactured to the specifications of WRG for distribution through WRG outlets around Australia
WRG was established over 20 years ago and trades under a number of brand names including “Say Cheese Wholesale” and “Cheese Culture” which markets and distributes a wide range of cheese products to retail outlets and food service customers across Australia.
The Chairman of BFC, Dr Roger Sexton said that the strategic alliance represented an important step closer to the realisation of the plans announced by BFC in December to build a dedicated white mould (soft cheese) factory at Murray Bridge, adjacent to its existing hard cheese factory.
WRG will provide a broad range of speciality cheese advice to BFC with a view to producing a superior range of high value soft cheeses to replace a proportion of cheeses currently imported from Europe and all parts of the international cheese world.
The Managing Director of WRG, Mr Peter Heaney said that the highly productive BFC dairy farms and other farms in Southern Australia are capable of producing the quality of milk required to produce import replacing white mould cheeses of a very high standard equal to or even better than many of the imported versions currently brought in from overseas.
Mr Heaney said that a lot of cheeses sold by his company are air freighted direct from overseas producers which adds cost to the products and detracts from their shelf life.
“We are keen to support Australia’s burgeoning specialty cheese industry, and we see our strategic alliance with BFC as an extremely important way of delivering on this objective,” Heaney said.
Dr Sexton said that the alliance with WRG also reflected the determination of BFC to shift the focus of its cheese making facilities at the Beston Pure Foods factories at Murray Bridge and Jervois away from commodity cheese making to specialist high end, value adding cheese making.
As an example, he noted that he had recently returned from Bangkok where BFC has launched a new cheese product designed and developed by BFC called “Kyubu” specifically for the ASEAN market in conjunction with a leading Japanese food technology company.
“Kyubu” is a Japanese style flavoured cheese snack sold in 80g pouch packs, both for Adults (eg as nibbles with a beer or other drinks) and for Children (eg as a school or after school healthy snack).
“Taste testing had been used in major Bangkok supermarkets to fine tune the natural flavour profiles of the Kyubu cheese products prior to release and all the cheese used in the products is being manufactured at our Murray Bridge factory”, he said.
Dr Sexton said that a number of other new BFC initiatives currently in train will be announced by the company in conjunction with the release of BFC‘s Half Year Results on Monday 29 February, 2016.