WELLINGTON, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand's dairy giant Fonterra is seeking opportunity from the Chinese mooncakes that might use butter as one of the ingredients.

As Chinese people all over the world celebrate the mid-autumn Festival, or the Moon Festival, on Tuesday, they gather for family reunions with the full moon and enjoy mooncakes that may have butter produced in Edgecumbe, a town in the Bay of Plenty of New Zealand's North Island.

The lamination butter sheets, a Fonterra product designed for bakeries to create soft and flaky pastries, have been manufactured in Edgecumbe through raw milk processing. With warmer spring weather bringing rapid grass growth and a jump in milk production, the company is seeing strong demand for butter sheets from the mooncakes, a Chinese pastry with a golden crust and sweet or savory fillings such as lotus paste, red bean and salted egg yolk.

Chinese consumers are shifting from plant-based to dairy-based products, as a growing number of bakeries in China are favoring dairy as an ingredient over lard or vegetable oil, said Janek Tomaszewski, Fonterra Edgecumbe's cream plant manager.

Traditionally, the pastry skin surrounding the usually sweet dense filling of mooncakes would not have included dairy, but butter is now common in some traditional Chinese pastries such as mooncakes and egg tarts, creating more opportunities for Fonterra's butter sheets, Tomaszewski said.

Demand for butter sheets has rapidly grown in the last three years. Edgecumbe exported over 8,300 tons of butter sheets last season, mainly to China and Southeast Asia. During peak season, the Edgecumbe site can process up to 3.7 million liters of milk every day, according to the company. Enditem

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