Fruit juice from the desert

For the first time, an Egyptian producer is filling fruit juice in hot-filled PET containers on a substantial scale

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SINCE early 2010, a flagship project for the milk and beverage industry in the Middle East has been up and running in one of Cairo's suburbs: filling beverages with a fruit-juice content in hot-filled PET containers on a substantial scale, and utilising state-of-the-art robot-based technology for palletising fruit-juice cartons. Juhayna, Egypt's leading beverage company, achieved these dual groundbreaking feats on the back of pioneering efforts taken nearly three decades ago. In 1983, Safwan Thabet bought a piece of land in the middle of the desert, back then still located far beyond Cairo's city limits. There he built a production facility where right from the start, he diversified his operations to comprise the three categories of milk, yoghurt and fruit juice. Very farsighted indeed, as in time these segments coalesced. And revolutionary. Back then packaged milk in Egypt was virtually non-existent, with a market share of less than one per cent; Egyptians were used to buying milk from open containers, and to usually boiling it at home before using it. Patient and persistent, using countless TV appearances and informational publications, the Juhayna founder and chairman succeeded in persuading the Egyptians of the advantages of packaged milk. Today, about 15 per cent of the milk consumed is in packaged form. "But this also means that we still have a market potential for packaged milk of 85 per cent," says Mr Thabet, noting that around 1.5 million babies are born in Egypt each year - the consumers of the future. "We're trying to increase our market share by a double-digit figure each year." Per capita consumption is 22 litres of milk a year, which includes dairy products Juhayna has launched in the market since the late 1980s: the milk-based 'Mix' drinks, the 'Zabado' yoghurt drinks and the fermented, probiotic 'Rayeb' milk drinks. UHT milk in cartons accounts for over 95 per cent of packaged milk in Egypt, with fresh milk in HDPE bottles only coming to about five per cent. There is as yet no ESL milk available on the Egyptian market, nor any milk filled in glass or PET. Massive expansion By 2001, Juhayna had increased output to 1,200 tons a day from the original production capacity of 35 tons a day. Four years later came the acquisition of the Domty milk- and fruit-juice plant only a couple of minutes away from its own facility. It is here, following a thorough revamp, where milk mass production has now been concentrated. Today, the facility specialises in 1-litre full-fat-milk containers, serving 60 per cent of the Egyptian and 40 per cent of the Libyan milk market. Juhayna produces yoghurt products, feta cheese, milk-based mixed drinks, fruit concentrates, and fruit juice in five other separate facilities located in the same industrial estate. In 2009, the company employed more than 3,000 people, 1,700 of them working in its logistics division formed in 2008, with 150 trucks and 22 distribution centres all over Egypt, right up to Aswan on the Upper Nile, a thousand kilometres away. A quarter of million tons were produced in 2009, including 190,000 tons of milk, dairy products and yoghurt, and 60,000 tons of fruit juices and fruit drinks. This gives Juhayna a share of around 70 per cent in Egypt's milk market, where it's also competing with international companies, and of 25 per cent for juices. Fruit juice at the 'Yellow Factory' Juhayna had been filling fruit juices exclusively in beverage cartons for over 20 years, but no longer. The 'Yellow Factory', a greenfield plant for fruit juice operations, not only accommodates five aseptic cartoning lines, it houses a PET line as well - not only a first for Juhayna but also for the entire Egyptian fruit-juice and fruit-juice-drinks market, which had previously been divJORDAN