Mitsubishi Corporation has announced a joint venture with Kaneka Corporation, PT. Kaneka Foods Indonesia (KFI), and will open a new factory in the city of Bekasi in Indonesia.
The move is aimed at enhancing KFI’s presence in confectionery and bakery ingredient markets in fast-growing Indonesia. The new factory will install equipment for the manufacture of filling and other processed oil products, such as margarine, and will have a production capacity of 15,000 metric tonne per year.
This project will invest a total of five billion yen, and the start of commercial production is planned for the first quarter of 2020.
The confectionery and bakery markets are expected to continue seeing steady expansion in Indonesia and other Asian countries due to overall population increases as well as the expansion of middle- to high-end consumer classes.
This is especially so in Indonesia, where the preference for baked products is increasingly an accepted part of daily lifestyles, and where the consumption of baked goods has been showing a compound annual growth rate of five percent.
KFI has, since 2013, been responding to customer needs by developing high-quality products that align with local tastes.
As a result of this effort, the company has achieved business expansion, including the successful introduction of a kind of soft bread with an unfamiliar texture to the Indonesian market.
Setting up this new factory will allow KFI to enter a new stage through the supply of new products such as margarine.
Furthermore, the company will be better able to combine product knowledge and technical applications based on customers’ specific needs, and accelerate product development.
KFI will spread the culture of Japanese style attractive confectionery and bakery around the Asian market to achieve a target of 10 billion yen in sales.
