Stern-Wywiol Gruppe is adding to its production and sales network in south-east Asia by establishing a new production facility for its subsidiary, SternMaid Asia Pacific Sdn Bhd, in the Iskandar economic zone, Malaysia. After the plants in Suzhou (China) and Mumbai, this is the third food industry facility that the family enterprise has opened in Asia and its sixth outside Germany.

The state-of-the-art facility is dedicated to the development and production of food ingredient systems to improve the functional qualities of food, according to the company. The facility has three completely separate production lines; initially, work will focus on enzyme-based ingredients systems for bakers and millers plus micronutrient mixes to fortify a wide variety of foods and beverages.

The German business has chosen a strategically-placed site located in the Iskandar economic zone within the Nusajaya Tech Park, Malaysia, close to the Singapore border and international container port Tanjung Pelepas. At the beginning of September, Stern-Wywiol Gruppe officially opened this high-tech production hub for the ASEAN region; its neighbors in the industrial park include famous multinational companies in industries such as aviation and aerospace, car electronics, precision engineering and data centers.

The decision to build the facility was essentially a response to the enormous growth potential now apparent in Asia’s emerging countries, whose food manufacturing is marked by an ongoing process of industrialization. Being present in this part of the world will allow the group to pursue its “make-to-order” strategy in the ASEAN region. Customers in the region benefit from shorter throughput times, better logistics and unbroken supply chains.

Torsten Wywiol, CEO of Stern-Wywiol-Gruppe, declares the opening of the facility to be “an important cornerstone of the firm’s growth strategy for Asia and beyond.” He also notes: “Being so close to customers will allow us to satisfy their need for shorter delivery times and superb logistics even better than before.”

Hendrik Mögenburg, General Manager of Stern Ingredients Asia-Pacific, also comments: “This facility has gross floor space of some 4,000 square meters and three completely separate production lines with a total annual capacity of up to 5,000 tons. Currently, our facility is in the process of becoming Halal certified and soon, with FSSC 22000 certification, will be in a position to meet all relevant quality management standards for food manufacturers.”

Speaking to FoodIngredientsFirst, Mögenburg, explains the changes in the ASEAN markets: “China has been hogging the spotlight for many years, ASEAN has been receiving somewhat less attention than it did more than 20 years ago when the ‘Tiger economies’ were the big story. China is now the second biggest economy in the world but in many ways a very distinct market requiring complete focus.”

ASEAN, with its more than 600 million consumers and a favorable population pyramid on the whole, already has well-developed supply chains and plenty of increasingly cosmopolitan professionals. But at the same time, the region promises a demographic dividend further boosting growth in places like Indonesia and Vietnam, for instance, as well as closer economic integration among members – part of it as a hedge against excessive economic dependency on China, he claims.

“With our regional marketing and technical service center in Singapore and the new plant in Malaysia, as well as existing ones in Suzhou, China and Mumbai, India, we believe we have the required resources in place for many years of growth and development in the region. We will keep adding technical and capabilities constantly, however, both in terms of laboratory resources and technical specialists each focused on particular applications and geographical markets.”

“We aim to supply a wide range of food ingredients from the new site, targeting most relevant sectors of the food industry. Solutions for baking and milling will be an initial focus, as will be beverages and the dairy sector, but we will limit ourselves to that going forward,” he adds.

The basic concept is that of modular, lean production, wherby capacity can be rapidly and efficiently scaled up or down. The powder manufacturing systems were made by MATCON, which is treating the new Stern-Wywiol Gruppe plant as its reference model for efficiency. Indeed, all of the plant machinery was sourced in Europe, the German engineering firm Lödige supplied parts of the blending system. €3.5 million has been invested in the facility, which can produce batches varying in size from 100 to 3,300 liters. In the quality assurance lab, fitted out following the latest standards and covering several hundred square meters, food technologists conduct microbiological assays, test for heavy metals and perform applications trials. The laboratory instruments were all supplied by well-known German manufacturers such as Brabender, the leading company in the international market for rheology equipment.

The Malaysian government has welcomed the Stern-Wywiol Gruppe investment as part of a strategic cluster of international producers and facilitated the firm’s establishment in the economic zone of Iskandar.