Got Chinese Milk?

EpiBiome COO Dr. Aaron Hammack and I visited a Yili dairy and dairy processing facility in Inner Mongolia, China yesterday.

Unless you've had the opportunity to visit one, whatever preconceptions you have about Chinese dairies and processing plants are probably wrong. 

In addition to the massive scale, which is required to satisfy the 1.35 billion+ populace that is increasingly developing a palate for dairy, Yili's operations are remarkably efficient and rely heavily on the Swedish Tetra Pak aseptic packaging technology and German automation. Although well known to Europeans, many within the US will be surprised to learn that this ultra-high temperature (UHT) pasteurized milk is shelf-stable for an entire year at room temperature!

Tetra Pak UHT Machine in Action!

A video posted by Aaron Tynes Hammack (@hobophysicist) on

Yili also closely monitors the milk for traces of antibiotic residues using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. These are better instruments than many of the ones I used as a chemist at Stanford University!

But the technology doesn't stop there; this insanely cool robot can stack >12,000 cartons of milk on a palette every hour!

Carton-stacking robot in action!

A video posted by Aaron Tynes Hammack (@hobophysicist) on

With all of the automation, it's easy to overlook the truly awe-inspiring fact that the contents of those 12,000 cartons that come off of a single production line each hour (there are many) originate from cows, massive animals that produce only about 6-7 gallons of milk a day. Feeding, watering, milking, and cleaning up after all of those animals is a daunting task.

To put things in perspective, a US "mega dairy" (a large "concentrated animal feeding operation") has about 1,000 cows. Compared to a large Chinese dairy, like the one we visited, this barely registers on the scale! In fact, the largest single dairy in China has about 100,000 cows, or about 7% of all of the cows in China and 0.4% of all of the cows in the world! Unfortunately, photography was banned on that tour.

Bovine mastitis, an inflammation of the udder tissue in dairy cattle, usually caused by bacterial infection, results in dramatic deterioration in the quantity and quality of milk the cow produces. Responsible for $200 in losses per cow per year, or about $2 billion/year in the US and $35 billion/year globally, mastitis is an expensive disease. Mastitis incidence in China is very high, about 2x that in the US, and it is the #1 reason to give a cow antibiotics.

It is no surprise then that within China's >$60 billion dairy industry, opportunities abound for companies that offer solutions for increased milk productivity and quality. EpiBiome is developing a therapeutic based on bacteriophages, which are safe and naturally occurring bacterial viruses, to control mastitis in dairy cows without the use of antibiotics. Interest among veterinary pharma and dairy producers is high, not just in the US and Europe, but in China, which has 50% more cows than the US.

Another fact that will surprise many Americans: China was actually ahead of the US in legislatively restricting the type of antibiotics allowed in agriculture and manner of their use, having adopted a policy that closely followed Europe's lead. Although it will take a few years until such policies are actually enforced, China's regulators are forward thinking and exhibit a level of progressiveness underestimated by many outsiders. 

Yili appears to strive for constant improvement, as evidenced by its "Rebirth of an Eagle" tenet displayed on the wall, and its hunger for excellence is palpable.

China 2015 is not the same China you know from Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films. It's a serious player in the world economy, and it's rapidly transitioning from a role of technology recipient to technology generator. To avoid the risk of being left in China's wake, US and European multinational corporations would do well to eliminate complacency from within their ranks.