ICE-cream is adored by people the world over yet it is so much more than just a sweet treat.
The dessert is helping boost northern NSW's dairy industry.
Norco chairman Greg McNamara told the Farm Writers' Association of NSW last Friday while the co-operative's milk exports to China were taking the business in the right direction, ice-cream was definitely the next big export opportunity.
"Ice-cream's important to our business," he said.
"You've got to have multiple strategies to succeed."
The Norco factory's ability to produce premium branded ice-cream and generic ice-cream for retailers, particularly in the off-shoulder period, had helped improve the co-op's bottom line.
Mr McNamara said Norco's philosophy was "adding value".
He said the co-op had worked with the major retailers, such as Coles, and learnt to make ice-cream.
While its own premium brand, Cape Byron, launched in 2001, was the number one ice-cream in Australia, the company almost went broke, he said.
Norco ice-cream made a loss for six or seven years and the board members knew they had to turn it around.
"The volume for premium ice-cream is so small in Australia," he said.
"A lot went broke and we were the last man standing."
Now Norco doesn't sell a branded product but its ice-cream arm is lucrative.
He said Streets Unilever had a problem in its Minto factory in Sydney some years ago so Norco spent $2 to $3 million adapting its factory to make Magnum ice-creams.
"We won supplier of the year at Coles in 2012 and again this year," Mr McNamara said.
"We make it for them and deliver it to their specifications."
Mr McNamara said he hoped to develop a market for the ice-cream in China and other Asian markets.
"We've sent a number of containers of ice-cream to China," he said.
The co-op has been exporting ice cream to Japan for 10 years, and shipped to the Philippines in March.
Ice-cream is just one of several facets at Norco, which has a 119-year history that includes expansion, contraction, joint ventures and buy-outs.
Mr McNamara said three prongs influenced the business strategy: disappearing land, increasing population and the need to feed it, and the retail sector.
"The consistent message is the diminishing area of land for agriculture," he said.
He said in the 1970s there was one acre of land per person, now it was .22 of an acre per person.
"Transition in agriculture is constant," he said.
The retail sector (Woolworths, Coles and Aldi) was the "big challenge people don't talk about", he said.
In April 2013, Norco secured the Coles branded milk contract for five years and began supplying as much as 65 million litres of milk a year - the equivalent of 500,000 bottles of milk a week.
"You need to get into the headspace of how others think before you have the conversation (with retailers)," Mr McNamara said.
He said short-term contracts once dictated the industry, as did demands to rationalise and cut costs, with the threat of loss of shelf space.
"Retailers are now saying, 'can we promote your provenance story?' and 'can we have it for a longer time?'," he said.
"But at some point, it's a negotiation, it's not a one-sided conversation.
"We need to find ways to extract the highest possible price because if we can't, nobody else will.
"But finally, we can say no to the retailer."
Among the multiple strategies at Norco are to have a strong presence in the route trade supply chain; selling fresh milk to China; and - the ice-cream.
Norco's success in China is well documented.
He attributed a mobile phone authenticator app as the deal clincher.
It was a way to convince the Chinese authorities, business partners and consumers Norco milk had the highest level of quality control available and was therefore worthy of being sold at a premium ($7 to $9 a bottle) to China's burgeoning middle class.
"Each bottle has a code on its label from the moment it passed the scanner in the factory to when it landed on the shelf in China and the consumer can scan it (to see that it has been rigorously tested)," he said.
"It was a game changer."
Norco's relationship with the Chinese was the main factor in the export success and now the co-op was looking to employ more Chinese people.
"We're a Caucasian business and we need to employ Chinese to seize the opportunities.
"Many Chinese we deal with don't speak good English and we don't speak Mandarin; there have been some misunderstandings."
