What Would Synlait Be Worth to Fonterra or a2 Milk?
Speculation of a possible joint move by Fonterra and a2 Milk to buy Synlait raises a much bigger strategic question, says agribusiness expert Dr Nic Lees.
But it didn’t stop there for the team at Fonterra’s Darfield site, who were also hard at work giving back to their local community – picking up where they left off during Covid.
Last year after the Covid-19 lockdown lifted, Tim Toulson, Fonterra Darfield mechanical team lead, and the maintenance team were met with great appreciation when they delivered food boxes to elderly people living alone in Darfield. So they decided to do it again for Christmas.
“We knew a lot of people were doing it tough out there during Covid so I really wanted to encourage the team to start thinking about others and what they could do to help them,” says Toulson.
“The feedback from the community was amazing. There was a heap of posts on the local Facebook page, and we even received thank you letters from those we helped. And we thought Christmas would be the perfect time to start that initiative up again.”
In the lead up to Christmas, around 25 employees from the maintenance team packed 60 food boxes with items for an early Christmas meal, as well as some extra nonperishable food items.
After packing the boxes, the team went out in the community to distribute it themselves and connect with those elderly people.
Ronel Beukes, who leads the Fonterra regional Hapori programme for Canterbury, says that after Covid there was a real appetite from the team at the Darfield site to be personally involved in community work and events. And as 2022 started to come to an end, the food parcels weren’t the only thing the staff participated in.
Throughout December the Darfield Hapori team, alongside the Darfield Transport team, organised an educational milk tanker roadshow to connect with schools in the region. They visited seven schools, where the tanker operator (driver) shared what they do on a daily basis.
And in November, the Fonterra Darfield team spent their Saturday morning with the Oxford Land Search & Rescue team. The team stopped by their annual LandSAR Incident Management Team refresher training course, to provide the search teams with some food to take along when they departed on their search.
“We thought a lot of our contractors and staff would be part of initiatives like this one, and that’s why we thought it would be great to show our support. It was also just a fantastic way to connect with the community in general,” said Beukes.
