Well, if New Zealand is going to bank its future on dairy exports to emerging markets in Asia, the first line of this article should be cause for alarm:
质检总局通报进境不合格食品名单，其中过半来自澳大利亚和新西兰
AQSIQ released a list of substandard imported food products, of which over half come from Australia and New Zealand.
This ain’t a good look, especially when it’s infant formula:
新西兰“奥兰超级金装婴儿配方奶粉”共26吨因碘含量不符合国家标准要求而被退货
26 tons of New Zealand’s Orkloland Super Gold infant formula were required to be recalled because the iodine content did not reach the national standard.
ORKLOLAND?!?!?!? The Chinese name sounds quite normal, but Orkloland looks, sounds and feels weird, and that google.co.nz search makes it sound even weirder. The Companies Office doesn’t seem to have heard of it. Ah, here we go, it’s a trade mark registered to East Tree International Trading Limited, whose sole director is one Hailin DU, and whose address seems to place it in a residential-looking area of Auckland. One does have to wonder how 26 tons of infant formula, substandard or otherwise, originates in a house in a very ordinary-looking suburban Auckland street. Looking through Food Safety’s list of registered dairy exporters, I see neither East Tree nor Orkloland, nor Ioland, which the Companies Office says is East Tree’s trading name, nor Hailin DU. I’m also failing to find a registered dairy exporter with the same address as East Tree. The Companies Office doesn’t list an email address, so I can’t compare that with the email addresses on the list of registered dairy exporters.
And now I’m wondering: Is this Orkloland/奥兰 for real? Is it actually produced in New Zealand? Is it legally exported? From the information I’ve found, I really don’t know.
And the article’s last paragraph is interesting. It says that before the melamine incident there were only 5or 6 domestic [presumably Chinese] companies that had registered milk powder brands in countries like Australia and New Zealand, but that number jumped to over 20 after the melamine incident.
“三四年前新西兰的奶粉品牌只有五六家，而目前新西兰的奶粉品牌猛增至20余家，新注册的奶粉品牌大多找当地企业代工，专供中国市场。”乳品专家王丁棉告诉记者。
“Three or four years ago there were only five or six New Zealand milk powder brands, but since then the number of New Zealand milk powder brands has exploded to over 20, and most of the newly registered milk powder brands find local [presumably New Zealand] companies to produce for them then specially import it to the Chinese market,” dairy product expert Wang Dingmian told this reporter.
Should I interpret that to mean that Fonterra partner Sanlu getting caught doctoring its milk with massive amounts of melamine and every other Chinese dairy company other than Sanyuan caught with at least some melamine in their products launched a rush of Chinese businesses to New Zealand to source milk powder from a “safe” country? Am I to take it that not all of these businesses are entirely scrupulous, that they’re happy to trade on New Zealand’s clean, green image, but not so keen to make sure their products live up to that image? This has me worried.
Ioland is here: http://www.ioland.com.cn/english/index.html ; it makes a big deal of its relationship with Sutton Group, who is presumably the actual producer of the product distributed in China under the Ioland brand. “Product of New Zealand” appears in conspicuously large letters all over the packaging.
Thank you, Joel. Somehow the idea of googling Ioland slipped my
mind. But Ioland really could use some help with their English… I notice they claim to be a registered dairy maker with a minstry that no longer exists – or is their poor English to blame and they’re accidentally claiming Sutton Group’s plant as their own?
Sutton Group is on the list of registered dairy exporters, so could legally export the infant formula. But I wonder if
it’s the same Sutton Group that got caught exporting substandard milk
powder back in September (http://tinyurl.com/bztuev8) – that incident also involved substandard iodine levels.