Soft-drink global behemoth, Coca Cola, is set to have an even-greater presence in China, as a new agreement has been signed that shall see a couple of billion renminbi poured into R&D and a new bottling plant in our very own Jiangsu Province.
Last Thursday, 12 January, saw Swire Coca-Cola sign off on the project comprising a total investment of ¥2 billion, in the process becoming the division’s largest-single investment in China to date.
The cash is destined for Kunshan in Suzhou City of Jiangsu, where the new Swire facility will have an annual output of more than 1.6 million tons. Hong Kong-based Swire is the fifth-largest bottling partner for Coca Cola worldwide.
Such a capacity will be achieved through what is being touted as the most-advanced and highly-automated production line in the food and beverage (F&B) industry, and by realising intelligent human-machine collaboration using cloud services and big data.
As a Swire Coca-Cola innovation centre, the investment into Kunshan will also help to bring more new products to market and to introduce new packaging in the future.
But why put it in Kunshan, previously the world’s largest producer of laptop computers?
That’s in part down to the increasing global concern for environmental issues; such large-scale manufacturing has fallen out of favour of late. In its place, Kunshan today has a plan to establish a new reputation as a high-end, food-industry hub, featuring innovation-driven growth, as reports Jiangsu Now.
An additional factor driving the Swire decision is also said to be the guarantee of energy consumption at the site, as well as in software support, particularly as regard talent and business-environment policy.
Elsewhere in the new Kunshan hub, Starbucks began construction of its China Coffee Innovation Park back in 2020, while Luckin Coffee last year broke ground on a fully-automated, coffee-bean-roasting production plant.
Among the other major F&B players to have also recently settled in Kunshan are notably Daifei Chocolate and Yizheng Food Roastery from China, Japan’s Nissei, and the Vietnamese coffee brand, Trung Nguyen.
