It recently launched four agro-industrial businesses supplying staple products such as milk and maize flour, and its retail-food chain, Mercal, aims to cover 60% of the market.

ECONOMIST: Venezuela

Investigators said the industrial salt nitrite had been added to fresh milk at two dairies in the north-western Gansu province in order to harm people.

BBC: Milk poisoning in northwest China 'deliberate'

Similar worries seem to have prompted the arrest in November of Zhao Lianhai, who had been campaigning on behalf of the parents of some 300, 000 children who were affected by milk powder tainted with melamine, an industrial chemical, in 2008.

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To achieve these feats, Nektar's scientists performed hundreds of hours of computer simulations, tested more than a dozen different formulations of dried insulin and traveled around the world drawing inspiration from ancient Chinese seeds, plants in the Mexican desert and production techniques used in making instant coffee, powdered milk, aviation aerodynamics, truck fuel injectors and industrial vacuum pumps.

FORBES: The Impossible Made Possible

Since at least 2005, the company has been operating a plant in the industrial town of Baddi that produces the cocoa-based drink Bournvita and Cadbury Dairy Milk, a brand of milk chocolate.

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During his two years of research, Kardashian followed the trail of milk from the small pastoral farms that dot the countryside around his Vermont home to the industrial dairy cattle plants of the Midwest, and 12, 000 years back in time to the dawn of dairy farming.

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