Kraft Foods Australia to close Broadmeadows facility

12/01/06 Kraft Foods Australia has announced the closure of its facility in Broadmeadows, Victoria, as of 31 March 2006. The facility employs 151 people.

The closure of the biscuits facility, built in 1964, is a result of an ongoing company wide business review. The review is looking at how the company can accelerate its competitiveness in the Australian food industry, through improvements and optimization across all key activities, and in line with Kraft’s global vision for sustainable growth.  

Since the acquisition of this business in 2002, Kraft Foods has worked to improve the performance of the Broadmeadows facility, safety of employees and quality of products whilst reducing costs. However, the review has shown that the facility lacks scale and manufacturing costs remain too high for the facility to remain sustainable within the highly competitive biscuits category.  Kraft will move manufacturing of biscuits, including brands such as In A Biskit, Premium, and Captain’s Table, to a regional facility in China and outsource the distribution of biscuits in Australia to a third party logistics provider. 

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