Chinese funding to cut specialist food packaging imports

Shiner International announced this week that the development of its Packaging Industrial Park project in Hainan will be part-funded by a government grant of RMB 29m ($4.26m).

Domestic boost​

The company, which specialises in food safe and anti-counterfeiting packaging, said the cash will be used in the construction of a new facility. The Chinese Government gave the green light to the funding because the plant will help domestic food manufacturers reduce their reliance on having to buy specialist film packing applications from overseas, said the company.

Shiner CEO Jian Fu said: "For quite some time, the Chinese domestic market has relied on the importing of high quality packaging films for high-end consumer products at great expense to Chinese manufacturers. In recent years, the central government has begun to realise the importance of domestically developed key technology products that utilise intellectual property that is developed and owned by Chinese companies such as Shiner.”​

Funding for its packaging project will allow the Chinese outfit to make its patented products in a state-of-the-art facility, he added. The money will be used for construction of infrastructures, improvement of capacity and recruitment of senior technical staff for the project.

“We believe the construction of this project, with the government's assistance, will enable us to deliver quality products at competitive prices to new and existing customers in the domestic and international markets”,​ said Jian.

Expansion​

The plant is expected to open later this year and will double the company’s production of food safe packaging to 30,000 tons/year within two years. By 2013, Shiner said it expected food safe packaging capacity to reach 50,000 tons/year.

The company told FoodProductionDaily.com last month that its business had received a boost in the wake of the Chinese melamine crisis last year.

“This crisis give us a big impact at first but now it turns out to be an opportunity too since people are concerned more about the food quality and the government implemented the food safety law to control food quality,"​ said a spokesman.