JAPANESE investors are taking interest on the dressed chickens produced by Ana’s Breeder Farms, Inc. (ABFI) through its world-class production facilities.
In an interview with ABFI Central Technical Office Project Manager engineer Edison C. Lazo, he said they are currently complying the export requirements to be able to export to Japan. Lazo added the Japanese businessmen are much interested on frozen chicken cut-ups.
“We are currently in talks with Japanese customers. Many times they have visited in our plants and they are amazed and interested that we will be the ones to supply chickens to them,” said Lazo.
The extent of their investment interests went as far as visiting the ABFI plant many times for the last two years.
“They visited many times and even transfer their technology here through training our people. Japanese are very meticulous on how to cut, how to package – they teach us. We even had employee sent to Japan who was trained for two months,” he said.
Once they have complied with the export requirements, shipment may already commence. Currently, their newly inaugurated Farmer’s Agro Industrial Park can dress 6,000 chickens per hour. However, Lazo said with its state-of-the-art components, it actually has the maximum capacity of dressing 10,000 to 12,000 chickens per hour.
He said they are slowly upgrading their capacities in the farm level which, he said, would also eventually complement with the high-capacity of their dressing equipment.
When pushed through, this is the first export market of ABFI. However, as they also are Halal-certified already and their machineries are imported, Lazo said they are actually modernizing and setting their production standards high in preparation for international market as their objective is not only to supply chickens to the Philippine market, which they had been doing since 1975.
Aside from Japan, customers from the Middle East have also expressed interest in outsourcing chickens from ABFI recently.
As for the neighboring countries, Lazo said they are trying to be as active to cater to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) market especially that Mindanao is made the backdoor gateway through the BIMP-Eaga.
Currently, customers from Indonesia and Malaysia have started visiting their plant and were as amazed as the Japanese customers of the plant’s world-class facilities.