Danone Opens €240 Million Sustainable Nutricia Plant in the Netherlands
Danone has officially opened its new Nutricia Cuijk production facility in the Netherlands, marking the completion of a three-year journey to build a state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, zero-waste plant. The facility will primarily produce specialized infant formula that meets the needs of infants diagnosed with specific medical conditions – such as cow’s milk protein allergy, as well as standard infant formula. The €240 million investment is among Danone’s largest in its European production network in the last ten years.
“At Danone, we believe the health of people and the planet are interconnected, as expressed through our company vision ‘One Planet. One Health’. Our new Nutricia Cuijk facility is a significant investment towards achieving that vision. At this facility, we’ll be producing food for vulnerable babies; and we’re also doing everything we can to preserve a healthy and clean environment for future generations,” says Veronique Penchienati-Bosetta, executive vice president of Danone Specialized Nutrition. “Producing such highly specialized infant formula, our new facility builds on the scientific heritage of Nutricia, coupled with the latest green technologies.”
The new Nutricia Cuijk plant has been built to spec to further support the expansion of Danone’s range of specialized infant formula products specially tailored for babies with specific health needs. The global prevalence of allergy, for example, is steadily rising, and approximately 2-5% of infants develop cow’s milk protein allergy within the first year of life.1 The Nutricia Cuijk plant employs a specific manufacturing process2 to produce foods for special medical purposes containing extensively hydrolyzed protein to meet the specific nutritional needs of infants diagnosed with this type of allergy.
Veronique Penchienati-Bosetta.
The new Nutricia Cuijk facility will replace an older, existing plant in Cuijk, which the company will gradually phase out. The newly-built Nutricia Cuijk facility uses advanced environmental technologies coupled with efficiently-designed manufacturing processes to ensure water and energy consumption as well as CO2 emissions are kept to a minimum. Once at full capacity, the new facility will have double the production capacity of the legacy plant. Despite this, the new plant will use 60% less water, 25% less energy and emit 50% less CO2 than the legacy plant.To further minimize the new facility’s carbon footprint, Nutricia Cuijk is powered by 100% renewable electricity.
Danone also targets reducing its full scope carbon emissions. Therefore, Nutricia Cuijk sources dairy ingredients exclusively from western Europe – the world’s region with the lowest dairy farming CO2 emission rates.3 Of these ingredients, a significant majority are sourced locally, from the Netherlands and neighbouring Germany. Nutricia Cuijk also embraces the principles of the circular economy – 100% of the facility’s waste is recovered, including all packaging waste.
A major investment for Danone in the Netherlands
Danone’s €240 million investment in Nutricia Cuijk, announced in 2015, represents the largest international capital investment in a greenfield location in the Dutch province of North-Brabant in over a decade.
With the new facility based in the Netherlands, Danone aims to build on the scientific capabilities of Nutricia and expects to benefit from the Netherland’s strong agricultural heritage, expertise in nutritional research and excellent local supply chains.
Once fully operational, the new Nutricia Cuijk facility will employ close to 500 staff and will – through indirect employment – support up to an additional 2,000 jobs. With the support of on-the-job training, the entire local workforce will transfer from the legacy plant in Cuijk to the newly-opened facility. At full capacity, Nutricia Cuijk will produce more than 600 different products – including the well-known Aptamil and Nutrilon brands – for customers in over 90 countries, feeding more than three-and-a-half million babies daily.
- Renz et al., Nature, 2018.
- The Nutricia Cuijk plant employs a specific manufacturing process called hydrolyzation. In this process, cow’s milk proteins are broken down – or ‘snipped’ – into smaller protein fragments. As a result, the immune system of a baby with cow’s milk protein allergy is less likely to trigger an allergic reaction.
- FAO report “Greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant supply chains – A Global Life Cycle Assessment” 2013
