Anchor, growing stronger and more beautiful
Our flagship brand, Anchor, is every bit the humble hero. Outside of New Zealand where it reigns supreme, it’s grown quietly from strength to strength, putting New Zealand on the map for dairy goodness. And it’s got its eye on South East Asia.
In the 60 seconds you’ll take to read this, two out of three families in New Zealand have bought Anchor and 108 Anchor products have been sold. 80% of the country’s branded fresh milk in supermarket chillers bears the brand’s iconic stamp but more than this – beyond butter, yogurt, custard, or cream - Anchor has become a quintessential part of Kiwi life, a staple in homes and the country’s number one most trusted brand across milk, butter and cheese.
As the Co-op’s largest global consumer brand, Anchor accounts for a NZ $1.2 billion in revenue. It’s on shelves in over 80 countries, represented by 600+ products playing across six dairy categories, and is consumed in so many different ways by families across the world.
It’s the number one butter in China, the most loved dairy brand in Sri Lanka, a market leader in Malaysia and the Middle East and has a massive global food service business to its name.
No small feat for a brand that had its early days as a little Waikato butter factory in 1886.
The rest, as they say, is history.
But even iconic brands go out on a limb, trying new things, leveraging deep market intimacy and innovating for relevance to consumers in all corners of the world.
It’s not a one size fits all approach and taking the effort to really understand the consumer is paying off for Anchor. It’s what we call GLO-CAL: delivering scale, efficiency and impact globally while enabling our brands and markets to respond more readily - and swiftly - to local consumer needs and preferences.
It’s exactly what Anchor has sought to nail in South East Asia with its latest innovations.
Powering South East Asia with Functional Wellness
Across South East Asia, you’ll find Anchor in some traditional formats, UHT milk and cream, chilled and canned butter, and cheese slices, a regional favourite.
In Malaysia, it’s known as Fernleaf, bearing the emblem of the NZ silver fern. This iconic Fernleaf trademark proved to land better with consumers, with a deeper connection to our provenance. Today Fernleaf has cornered the market with its creamy milk powders and yoghurts, making its way to school canteens across Malaysia, with the very same NZ goodness as our Anchor brand.
Meanwhile, new Anchor innovations are hitting shelves in Malaysia and the Philippines - a bold play in an emerging functional wellness segment. Consumers are seeking healthier, natural, and more nutritional alternatives to base milk powder, and more than ever, they’ve started to care where that nutrition comes from.
Enter Protein+, a delicious high-protein milk drink, and Milk & Grain, a filling milk drink with added fibre and multigrain that supports overall digestive wellness. Value add family milk powders are a growing category in the region, pegged at a NZ $38 million (NSV) in powders alone.
It’s a clever play on premiumisation, blending nature and nutrition science to deliver dairy protein in an affordable way while getting more value for every drop of our NZ milk.
Consumers in South East Asia are seeking healthier, natural, and more nutritional alternatives to base milk powder, and more than ever, they’ve started to care where that nutrition comes from. Our new innovations combine the best of New Zealand dairy and Fonterra science to deliver functional nutrition on the go.
Ingestible beauty - can drinking Anchor make you beautiful? Apparently so.
Months in the making and two new Anchor products – Anchor Actif-Fiber and Anchor Beaute – developed in an exclusive innovation partnership with 7-Eleven, have just hit 14,000 stores across Thailand.
Both beverages combine the best of New Zealand dairy and Fonterra science to deliver functional nutrition on the go, tapping into Thai consumers’ desire for wellbeing and convenience with a great-tasting ready-to-drink format targeting gut health and beauty.
Actif-Fiber is fortified with exactly that – fibre – to aid digestion and immunity, while Beaute is loaded with zinc and collagen that add a little somethin’ for an inside-out kind of glow.
Whether its inner wellness or beauty you're after, Anchor has you covered.
Listen to Brent Whelan, GM Anchor as he shares about these new products and how Anchor is helping to take the goodness of New Zealand dairy to the world