Last week, DSM broke ground on a new premix production facility for the early life nutrition (ELN) category at its existing site in Buk, Poland. FoodBev reported that the expansion would allow DSM to continue to meet strong demand from a growing market.
FoodBev attended the breaking-ground ceremony in Buk and, here, FoodBev’s Alex Clere speaks with Irene Wosgien, vice-president global operations for DSM Human Nutrition & Health; and Ronnie Pankhurst, director of premix operations for DSM in EMEA, about the rationale for extending the Buk site.
“We see that our customers, both local and international customers that serve the ELN segment – their requirements and their ‘ask’ from us is increasing day by day,” Pankhurst explains. “What we also see is that the regulations within this environment are also becoming more stringent and tougher to comply with, so what we are doing here is we are building a plant dedicated to this segment in order to then meet our customer requirements, as well as the tougher regulations that are being set.”
And Wosgien continued: “Buk is a well-developed area: the infrastructure, the logistics companies here, but also an airport in the neighbourhood. It has been decided based also on having availability of highly educated people to invest here in this area, which has been quite successful; we have been growing and also making an important difference in this area, and based on this success and this development the growth that we were able to have in this area actually made our decision very easy to expand our asset footprint here.”
DSM first announced its intention to build an ELN premix production facility in Buk last month, and CFO Geraldine Matchett helped break the ground to kick off construction last week.
Buk is a town 20km west of Poznań that has undergone major industrial regeneration in recent years; the DSM factory in Buk was originally built five years ago by Fortitech, and subsumed into the DSM Group following its acquisition.
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