Fonterra has announced a further NZ$30 million investment to expand its Dry Distribution Centre at its Whareroa site in Taranaki.

This follows a $23 million upgrade of the Whareroa coolstores last year, bringing the total capital investment in the logistics infrastructure on site to more than $50 million since 2011.

Fonterra director of logistics, Mark Leslie, said the project is part of Fonterra’s overall drive to simplify its supply chain and reduce the associated costs.

“These investments are part of a strategy to deliver more products, more directly to ports for export,” said Leslie. “Our capacity to process milk continues to increase, which means that our storage capacity must grow to meet this. Where possible we want to store product at the point of manufacture to reduce costs.”

Fonterra has steadily increased onsite storage capacity, building four distribution centres since 2008 at Crawford Street in the Waikato, Mosgiel near Dunedin, Kauri in Whangarei and Darfield in Canterbury.

“This investment at our Whareroa facility will improve our logistics network’s storage capacity and address existing capacity constraints in the region,” continued Leslie. “This means we are able to reduce the number of freight movements from where a product is manufactured through to delivery to the customer which reduces our carbon footprint and ultimately saves on transport costs.”

Construction is expected to be complete by August 2014.