{"id":60048,"date":"2026-05-05T02:05:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T02:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/60048\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T02:05:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T02:05:22","slug":"irish-factory-prospered-because-of-chinas-babies-then-nestle-pulled-the-plug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/60048\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish Factory Prospered Because of China\u2019s Babies. Then Nestl\u00e9 Pulled the Plug."},"content":{"rendered":"

The powder was so lucrative that some people here called it cocaine.<\/p>\n

The men and women making pricey infant formula for Chinese babies at a factory in Askeaton, a small town in the southwestern Irish county of Limerick, had helped to turn around the fortunes of a place long overlooked.<\/p>\n

So when the people in suits unexpectedly arrived from Switzerland two years ago to deliver a death blow<\/a> to the more than 540 workers employed at the plant, the first reaction was disbelief.<\/p>\n

No one could believe that Nestl\u00e9, a multinational food giant, would simply shutter a sophisticated plant into which it had invested hundreds of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of a sudden, the factory looked drab,\u201d said Carmel Ryan, the unofficial town historian who runs the Askeaton Tourist Office and whose husband, Michael, worked at the factory for 34 years before retiring. \u201cIt was like the sunlight was gone from behind it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to find someone in this town of 1,100 who worked at the plant or has a story to share about a friend or relative who was laid off. The factory was such a large presence in years past that when a baby was born, tins of milk powder would appear on the doorstep, a gift from a neighbor working there.<\/p>\n

From the banks of the Deel River in the center of town, the factory, originally built in 1974 and passing through various owners before Nestl\u00e9 acquired it, looked like a lumpy green mass on the horizon. But people in town considered it one of the best places in Ireland to work. The jobs at the factory were so stable that the local credit union needed only a worker\u2019s most recent pay slip to give out a loan.<\/p>\n

Then came the Nestl\u00e9 announcements: the proposal to close the plant in the fall of 2023 and a definitive decision to shut it down reached in January 2024.<\/p>\n

After the swarm of local reporters filled their notebooks with stories of the job losses to come and the national television crews packed up their vans, the initial shock gave way to suspicion.<\/p>\n

Nestl\u00e9 had blamed waning demand for its baby formula products in China, where the birthrate was plummeting, for the factory closure. It cited a drastic fall in births to nine million in 2023 from 18 million in 2016. So few people were having babies in China that its population had begun to shrink<\/a>, and this plant closure was an example of how that decline was reverberating around the world.<\/p>\n

But still, people had questions: Was there something else to the story?<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t believe the story as it\u2019s presented,\u201d said Kevin Sheahan, who was the longest-serving councilor in the county of Limerick until he retired from public office last year. \u201cThere\u2019s a piece missing in that jigsaw.\u201d<\/p>\n

People began talking: Did the closure have more to do with a demand from China to move the factory closer to its consumers?<\/p>\n

Residents of Askeaton recalled feeling uneasy years ago about Nestl\u00e9\u2019s strategic shift to go all in on China, closing off the many markets in Europe and the Middle East it had supplied baby formula to for decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll our eggs were in one basket,\u201d said Oliver Scanlon, 63, a farmer who worked at the factory for 40 years before he left several years ago.<\/p>\n

And yet, the factory saw its best days when it was selling only to China.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey called it the jewel in the crown,\u201d Mr. Scanlon said.<\/p>\n

Looking back, people in Askeaton say there were signs that China wasn\u2019t just interested in buying their baby formula, but also in learning every step in how it was made.<\/p>\n

Workers swapped stories about the Chinese auditors who visited every year, asking detailed questions about each process in the plant.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey came and they picked up on the smallest things,\u201d observed Jimmy O\u2019Donoghue, 63, who worked as a general operator at the plant for 30 years.<\/p>\n

Tim Hanley remembers well when a group from China showed up at his dairy farm down the road from the plant around eight years ago. Members of the group told him they were doing research, though he thought they might have been potential buyers of the plant.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an alarm bell ringing, you know,\u201d said Mr. Hanley, 50, whose 200 cows supply milk that would eventually end up at the plant.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fairness to the Chinese,\u201d he added, \u201cthey can produce everything themselves, you know. Self-sufficiency is what they\u2019re all about. So they come, they learn, they take their trade back home.\u201d<\/p>\n

For years, foreign brands clamored to get into China to sell their milk, cars and luxury items, seeing only the possibility of 1.4 billion customers. After a tainted-milk scandal in 2008 shocked the nation, even Chinese families with limited income were willing to pay more for foreign baby milk powder than families in other regions like Europe.<\/p>\n

But doing business in China can come at a steep cost, including the transfer of know-how that is ultimately felt by workers back home.<\/p>\n

At the time of its closure announcement, Nestl\u00e9 said that it planned to transfer production that had been done in Askeaton to facilities in Switzerland and China. Workers at the plant started leaving in waves, as the company slowly negotiated its way through pay packages.<\/p>\n

A month after it said it would close the Irish plant, in November 2023, Nestl\u00e9 said it had won approval for a factory in Suzhou, in eastern China, to make and sell a similar product to what it had been making in Askeaton.<\/p>\n

After warning about the falling birthrate, Nestl\u00e9 has since been more cheerful about the China market, saying<\/a> it \u201cremains the world\u2019s largest\u201d because of \u201cthe sheer number of newborns.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this has left people in Askeaton feeling raw, though ultimately, the reasons behind the closure matter less to the people of Askeaton than how it will reverberate. <\/p>\n

While the factory remains capable of production, no milk powder has been made at the plant since last month. Unless someone decides to buy the plant from Nestl\u00e9, which is selling it for 22 million euros, or about $26 million, the factory doors will shut for the last time in March.<\/p>\n

In a statement, Nestl\u00e9 said that since announcing its proposal to close the factory in 2023, \u201csupporting our employees has been our priority,\u201d adding that it has provided training and assistance to help them find new jobs.<\/p>\n

Driving through Askeaton, it is impossible to miss T.S. Morain, a brightly colored hardware store. Inside, Se\u00e1n Moran, 56, stacks the shelves with television remote controls, microwaves and hair dryers, and hopes he can keep the lights on in the shop that has been in his family for three generations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s going to hit,\u201d said Mr. Moran about the factory closure. He recalled leaving Ireland in the 1980s to look for work because there were so few opportunities at home. \u201cPeople won\u2019t have the money to do what they want to do as often as they would like,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But times are not as tough anymore, he said, and people will find a way. Some of the younger workers at the Nestl\u00e9 factory have found new jobs at nearby plants owned by the multinational pharmaceutical companies Regeneron and Eli Lilly.<\/p>\n

Still, across the street at the local credit union, employees are on alert. When times were flush, if you worked at the factory, you were guaranteed a loan, said Patrick Ranahan, a business development executive at the credit union. Now, he explained \u201cit\u2019s definitely harder to get that over the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was good wages, which meant that the town flourished,\u201d said Mr. Ranahan who remembered his mother receiving tins of baby food from neighbors when he was young. \u201cBut,\u201d he added, \u201cthere was always the possibility that it could be yanked away at any second.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The powder was so lucrative that some people here called it cocaine. The men and women making pricey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[33288,33287,351,31372,33283,33285,33286,3791,30354,199,2044,33284,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-60048","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nestle","8":"tag-askeaton-ireland","9":"tag-birth-rates","10":"tag-china","11":"tag-economic-conditions-and-trends","12":"tag-factories-and-manufacturing","13":"tag-infant-formulas","14":"tag-international-trade-and-world-market","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-layoffs-and-job-reductions","17":"tag-nestle","18":"tag-nestle-sa","19":"tag-shutdowns-institutional","20":"tag-switzerland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116519523104366981","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}