STRENGTHENED COOPERATION BETWEEN AEB AND THE GROUP VIGOR ITAMBÉ

The group Vigor Itambé is the most important actor in the Brazilian market of milk and its derivatives. It is a group established in 2013, with Vigor (at the time a branch of Brasil Food) purchasing 50% of Itambé, the largest cooperative of milk producers in Brazil.
In fact, Itambé has about 8.500 suppliers, producing a total of 3,5 million litres of milk per day. Today the entire organization has 14 production units (5 Itambé and 9 Vigor) distributed in the most populous states of Brazil and supplies to consumers a wide range of dairy specialties, from liquid milk to fermented products, fresh and seasoned cheeses, requeijao and milk and fruit based drinks.

Despite a strong interest by Lactalis Group, the Mexican group Lala Food, with a transaction worth $ 1,84 billion, purchased Vigor Itambé in August 2017. During 2017, three factories of the group carried out some trials, then confirmed by stable purchases with our foam detergents; also, thanks to the sale of a filter for brine at the end of 2016, one of the factories is regularly purchasing filter aids.

In September, at the Vigor factory in San Paul, a single-phase acid industrial washing trial with the product Celon MPB was carried out for some transport trucks and some raw milk and cream receiving tanks. In conjunction with the trial, which has given excellent results concerning the microbiological quality of the treated surfaces, we carried out a cost estimate of our procedure compared to conventional washing.
The Industrial Management of Vigor Itambé is now evaluating the significant savings obtained.

The industrial trial carried out in San Paulo was also a training field for the washing procedures and for the assessment of their economic impact for our Brazilian commercial technical staff, mainly composed by Moises Perez, Country Manager and Gabriel Alquati, Food Commercial Manager of AEB Brazil.
In addition to the sales of Celon MPB at the factory of Vigor San Paulo where trials were carried out, we are confident of the multiplier effect on the other plants of the group and on other dairy processing facilities in Brazil.