Unilever shows commitment to China with 'lighthouse factory'

With a designed daily output of 9 million ice creams, Unilever's ice cream "lighthouse factory" in Taicang of East China's Jiangsu province represents the company's long-term commitment to the China market by better satisfying Chinese consumers' demands with digital and intelligent technologies, a senior executive from the consumer goods company said.

"The 100-million-euro factory is the largest investment Unilever has made in the past decade in China, which makes our production intelligent and digitalized," Xu Yucong, North Asia general manager of Unilever ice cream, said during an interview on Wednesday.

The factory can shorten the period for new product innovation from 12 months to three and enhance the accuracy and efficiency of product demand prediction.

The plant is more agile than conventional ones, "allowing us to better keep up with fast-paced consumer demand in China," Xu said.

For example, the factory can produce a maximum 9 million units of Wall's ice creams, including Magnum and Cornetto, on a daily basis.

The plant is also capable of reducing carbon emissions by 83 percent and energy and water consumption by 14 percent.

Known as the world's first "lighthouse factory" in the ice cream industry for its place in the part of the Lighthouse Network, the World Economic Forum's community of next-generation manufacturing sites. Lighthouse sites adopt and deploy Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to transform business operations through innovation, sustainable practices and maximized efficiency.

Euromonitor International said China's ice cream market rose from 41.58 billion yuan in 2017 to 52.28 billion yuan in sales revenue in 2022, and it projected the scale would reach 59.87 billion yuan by 2027.

In recent years, Wall's saw double-digit growth annually in the China market, much higher than the Euromonitor International data, Xu said.

"There is huge potential in Chinese ice cream consumption, and we are full of confidence to benefit from this market."

Ice cream consumption per person in China is currently the third-largest in the world, after the US and Japan.