The powder was so lucrative that some people here called it cocaine.
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.
So when the people in suits unexpectedly arrived from Switzerland two years ago to deliver a death blow to the more than 540 workers employed at the plant, the first reaction was disbelief.
No one could believe that Nestlé, a multinational food giant, would simply shutter a sophisticated plant into which it had invested hundreds of millions of dollars.
“All of a sudden, the factory looked drab,” 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. “It was like the sunlight was gone from behind it.”
It’s 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 that when a baby was born, tins of milk powder would appear on the doorstep, a gift from a neighbor working there.
From the banks of the Deel River in the center of town, the factory, originally built in 1974 and passing through various owners before Nestlé 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’s most recent pay slip to give out a loan.
Then came the Nestlé announcement.
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.
Nestlé 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, and this plant closure was an example of how that decline was reverberating around the world.
But still, people had questions: Was there something else to the story?
“I can’t believe the story as it’s presented,” said Kevin Sheahan, who was the longest-serving councilor in the county of Limerick until he retired from public office last year. “There’s a piece missing in that jigsaw.”
People began talking: Did the closure have more to do with a demand from China to move the factory closer to its consumers?
Residents of Askeaton recalled feeling uneasy years ago about Nestlé’s 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.
“All our eggs were in one basket,” said Oliver Scanlon, 63, a farmer who worked at the factory for 40 years before he left several years ago.
And yet, the factory saw its best days when it was selling only to China.
“They called it the jewel in the crown,” Mr. Scanlon said.
Looking back, people in Askeaton say there were signs that China wasn’t just interested in buying their baby formula, but also in learning every step in how it was made.
Workers swapped stories about the Chinese auditors who visited every year, asking detailed questions about each process in the plant.
“They came and they picked up on the smallest things,” observed Jimmy O’Donoghue, 63, who worked as a general operator at the plant for 30 years.
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.
“It was an alarm bell ringing, you know,” said Mr. Hanley, 50, whose 200 cows supply milk that would eventually end up at the plant.
“In fairness to the Chinese,” he added, “they can produce everything themselves, you know. Self-sufficiency is what they’re all about. So they come, they learn, they take their trade back home.”
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.
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.
At the time of its closure announcement, Nestlé 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.
A month after it said it would close the Irish plant, in November 2023, Nestlé 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.
After warning about the falling birthrate, Nestlé has since been more cheerful about the China market, saying it “remains the world’s largest” because of “the sheer number of newborns.”
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.
The last batch of milk powder was made at the plant last month. Unless someone decides to buy the plant from Nestlé, which is selling it for 22 million euros, or about $26 million, the factory doors will shut for the last time in March.
In a statement, Nestlé said that since announcing its proposal to close the factory in 2023, “supporting our employees has been our priority,” adding that it has provided training and assistance to help them find new jobs.
Driving through Askeaton, it is impossible to miss T.S. Morain, a brightly colored hardware store. Inside, Seán 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.
“I think it’s going to hit,” 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. “People won’t have the money to do what they want to do as often as they would like,” he said.
But times are not as tough anymore, he said, and people will find a way. Some of the younger workers at the Nestlé factory have found new jobs at nearby plants owned by the multinational pharmaceutical companies Regeneron and Eli Lilly.
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 “it’s definitely harder to get that over the line.”
“There was good wages, which meant that the town flourished,” said Mr. Ranahan who remembered his mother receiving tins of baby food from neighbors when he was young. “But,” he added, “there was always the possibility that it could be yanked away at any second.”
Alexandra Stevenson is the Shanghai bureau chief for The Times, reporting on China’s economy and society.
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