Food processing in a global environment – Cedenco Foods

Carla Mcculloch: Cedenco’s a bulk ingredient manufacturer. We make paste, powders and frozen pieces, and we often pack these products into bulk packaging. 20kgs up to 1.5 tonne bins.

So you won’t see Cedenco brands on the shelf, but you will see other companies that we sell to. So Heinz, Wattie's, Nestle, Continental, Cerebos, Coca-Cola so all those types of companies – they all use our ingredients. We sell to domestic customers, so New Zealand companies, we’ll also send products to Australia and mainly Asia.

For our factory it can be a really long time from when the raw material comes into the factory and from when the material reaches the customer, so a lot of time and resources, a lot of testing, that sort of thing, to approve the product and then to get the orders ready and then off to the customer.

Pumpkin or squash is the green skin squash that we have a lot, we do a lot with. We do what we call IQFs, so Individually Quick Frozen processing. Mainly the Asian countries really like this pumpkin with the skin on, so we do a small ten ml dice with the skin on. Other customers like the skin being off the pieces, and larger chunkier what we call random cut pieces. So that’s a really, really, popular product for us and seems to be gaining momentum in the market place. Also with pumpkin we make a frozen puree and we make [an] aseptic puree as well. Then of course we do pumpkin powder. So, pumpkin is a really important vegetable for us.

An aseptic paste for us is one that's shelf stable, it gets pasteurised or heat treated at a really high temperature, really quickly, so that it maintains its colour. Then it’s packed into a multi layered foil bag which allows it to be stored at ambient temperatures for up to 2 to 3 years, so it’s shelf stable and that’s what we call the aseptic paste, so it’s commercially sterile. To have freezer and chilled space it’s really expensive for companies, so the aseptic purees and pastes are a really good option for them if they only have dry storage, so they can store it in a dry storage and that can be left for up to 2 years. So, they could buy a whole lot of product and they don’t have to have any pressures to use it straight away. Sometimes if they can use it for longer, but sometimes the colour will diminish over time.

Another product that we’ve picked up over the last couple of years is thin pumpkin slices and that goes to Japan also. The customer there deep fries it so it’s like a chip and they put it into a packet with other thin slices of onion and sweet potato or kumara. Some of our kumara. So that is in its infant stage at the moment with us and we hope that the customer will be able to grow their sales in Japan so that we can produce more for them, it’s a good product development for Cedenco.