Poultry producer launches exports to UK
The Polish company sells its products to Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus, and is the country’s only exporter of turkey meat to Lebanon, according to senior company representatives.
Exports on growth path
“We recently obtained the BRC certificate which allows us to launch sales to the UK,” Wojciech Zarzycki, vice-president and director for finance and development at ZD Stasin, told local news site Portalspozywczy.pl.
The meat business has a slaughterhouse fitted with a capacity of 500,000 head per month, and posts revenues in the range of PLN185 million (€44m) per year.
With export sales on the rise, the Polish company said it was planning to boost its breeding capacities to increase production. ZD Stasin has purchased two land plots fitted with a total surface of 200,000 square metres, according to Zarzycki. The company aims to use the land to develop its own poultry farms.
While the majority of the firm’s export sales are intended for other member states of the European Union, ZD Stasin is planning to launch exports to a number of new foreign markets, in particular in various Asian countries. Some of the greatest prospects for the company’s poultry meat exports include China, according to Zarzycki.
Regulatory concerns
The company said its facilities are certified to produce halal meat, enabling it to export to the Middle East. However, it is noteworthy that, last month, lawmakers from Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party introduced a draft bill to ban non-stun slaughter. The proposal has been protested by a number of meat industry associations and players who say that such a measure would significantly hamper Poland’s meat exports to the Middle East, but also to selected foreign markets in Europe.
ZD Stasin’s management cautions against the potential losses that the planned measure could inflict on Poland’s meat industry.
“Imposing a ban on non-stun slaughter could generate losses for both meat processors and breeders,” Zarzycki said. “We export such meat to France, Lebanon and Germany, and we also sell it in Poland.”
The past year has brought a significant increase in Poland’s poultry production. Last August, local companies with more than 50 employees produced about 228,000 tonnes (t) of poultry meat, up 10.7% compared with the same month a year earlier, according to the latest available data from the Warsaw-based Institute of Agricultural and Food Economics (IERiGZ). In the first eight months of 2017, Polish poultry meat production totalled 1.762 million t, an increase of 9.9% compared with the same period last year
Set up in 2007, the meat business is based in Stasin, in the country’s central region, about 106km from Poland’s capital Warsaw, where it also operates its facilities.
