Agri-food industry: Reconstituted milk: instructions for use | Imaz Press Reunion: Reunion news in photos

Let's go over the details, the resulting oil, once cooled, is packaged in large 190 to 210 kg food steel drums, under a nitrogen or carbon dioxide atmosphere. MGLA, concentrated butter or industrial butter, has the advantage of being more easily preserved than "real" butter due to its very low water content. But such products are likely to oxidize, all the more quickly as they come from poor quality raw materials. At room temperature, they should be used within 12 months of manufacture; at a temperature below +10°C, they can be kept for around 24 months. The specialist literature explains that butter oils or MGLA "are used with milk powder in developing countries for the reconstitution of milk and milk products". It should be further specified that these products are used in most industrial or domestic food preparations using butter or other fats.

In Reunion, in the best of industrial worlds, with water, more than 40,000 tons of milk powder imported per year and anhydrous milk fat in proportion, we could almost do without a local milk production. No doubt this is why the livestock health crisis has been going on quietly for ten years. As long as there are a few breeders and a few cows left for decoration and promotional operations in supermarkets… And then Sicalait is the parent company of flourishing businesses such as Cilam or Urcoopa.

It is nonetheless true that the milk we are sold is not really milk, according to the legal definition: "The name "milk" is reserved exclusively for the product of normal mammary secretion, obtained by one or more drafts, without any addition or subtraction…”; it's quite simply "reconstituted milk", it's written on it, the qualifier "partially" being purely… cosmetic, because reconstituted or recombined milk may or may not contain a fraction of "real" milk.