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China, February 06, 2010
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The average Canadian eats 30 pounds of french fries per year. In China, per capita consumption is less than 3½ ounces.
McCain Foods Ltd. is trying to turn the figures for Asia's largest country around.
And there is hope for McCain, whose biggest fast-food restaurant chain clients, KFC and McDonald's, are seeing exponential growth in China - a country of 1.3 billion people.
Just over 20 years ago, McCain felt the Chinese market wasn't strong enough to warrant setting up a french fry factory.
KFC and McDonald's were just breaking into China in the late 1980s and neither were posting figures that would entice McCain to move in as an on-the-ground supplier.
In the mid-'90s, though, business started to pick up and McCain began selling into China seriously.
By 2005, it had built its own potato processing plant to help meet demand.
Now, the company says it is the largest producer and supplier of both domestically produced and imported frozen potato and appetizer products in China.
Terry Bird, vice-president of corporate development and emerging markets, predicts that less than two decades from now, Asia alone is set to match the scale of McCain's entire global operation.
"Last year, we did $6.5 billion in the world with 20,000 employees at 60 factories," he says.
"We see Asia, the potential for Asia, being as big as our whole company in 10 to 15 years' time." | | | |
| European Union, February 01, 2010
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EUPPA, the European Potato Processors’ Association, is the new name of the former UEITP (Union européenne des industries de transformation de pommes de terre), as its president Kees Meijer stated during a meeting today with members of the European Parliament and staff members of the European Commission in the buildings of the European Parliament in Brussels.
Although the European potato processing industry is a rather young sector in the food industry, the European association has already been created in 1962. Since then the sector had developed in a spectacular way to a world player with about 12 million tonnes of potatoes (20 % of the total EU crop) being processed to frites, crisps, croquettes, flakes, mashed, and other potato products. More than 25.000 employees have found a job in this industry.
550.000 tonnes of finished product is being exported all over the world. On world level the major exporters are The Netherlands, Canada, Belgium and the United States. However the sector has also a rich tradition of marketing a wide variety of potato specialities in the various EU member states.
It was no coincidence that the first EUPPA event took place under the title ‘bringing tradition on today’s plate, all over the world’.
EUPPA represents the potato processors of the ‘big five’ potato producers in the EU (Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and United Kingdom), but also of Austria, Italy, Poland and Sweden and is a member of the CIAA, Europe’s food industry association. | | | |
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