The information below has been supplied by dairy marketers and other industry organizations. It has not been edited, verified or endorsed by Hoard’s Dairyman.

Global Dairy Trade’s online dairy trading platform, GDT Events, has passed the milestone of US$20 billion cumulative value of products sold at the 185th trading event today.

Eric Hansen, Director of Global Dairy Trade said: “GDT Events enables high volumes of dairy ingredients to be traded efficiently and this unique scale underpins the reliability of the reference pricing.

“Over 40 specifications of dairy ingredients are offered to over 500 registered bidders from 80 countries, offering more trading opportunities than any other trading platform. GDT Events, now in its 9th year, has traded more than 5.8 million metric tonnes (12.8 billion pounds) of dairy ingredients, enough to fill over 365,000 twenty-foot shipping containers.

“GDT Events performed successfully against the backdrop of a prolonged two-year downturn on the global dairy market. In 2016, despite the relatively weak market conditions, more than 95 per cent of the dairy products offered were sold.

“We’re continuing our investment and commitment to GDT Events to deliver a deeper ecommerce customer experience and greater flexibility for users. We’re also looking at the viability of creating multi-seller pools for homogenous products, such as generic lactose or other commodity products available from certain regions. This would extend the benefits of credible price discovery to a wider range of markets and products,” he said.

In 2016, Global Dairy Trade established the GDT Events Oversight Board to continue enhancing independence and transparency of the twice-monthly auction platform.

Bill Shields, Chairman of GDT Events Oversight Board said GDT Events is the leading provider of reference prices for core ingredients, reflecting the levels of global supply and demand traded on the platform.

“The prices established on GDT Events, provide businesses throughout the supply chain with an enhanced level of visibility of the dairy sector and can be used to improve their future planning. GDT Events has demonstrated that better price discovery can be beneficial to market participants whether prices are weak or strong, and can contribute to better price risk management within the dairy industry,” he said.

Global Dairy Trade, the digital multiservice business, offers a strong suite of complementary online services, including GDT Events, GDT Marketplace and GDT Insights that deliver benefits to dairy buyers, sellers and the financial dairy trading sector.

About Global Dairy Trade

Global Dairy Trade, the world’s leader in global dairy trading, offers a range of complementary services, GDT Events, GDT Insight and GDT Marketplace, for dairy buyers, manufacturers and the financial dairy trading sector. For more information about Global Dairy Trade please visit www.globaldairytrade.info.