The parent company behind some of Australia's most-loved chocolates wants to modernise the treat-making process, but it can't do it without some help from the government.
Mondelez International, which owns Cadbury, appeared before a parliamentary inquiry on Thursday to give feedback on the government's $22.7 billion Future Made in Australia bill.
The manufacturing package aims to fund clean energy projects and create jobs in the decarbonisation transition.
Mondelez director Stephanie Saliba said energy and the rising cost of manufacturing were some of the key barriers to improving the company's sustainability.
"There are some significant investments that need to take place within manufacturing in order to get to net-zero," she told the inquiry.
When Cadbury makes chocolate, for example, it uses gas boilers at very high temperatures to melt cocoa into its liquid form.
But the technology is not ready to transition from these gas-powered machines to renewable energy-driven processes and, even if it was, these boilers are expensive and many have a 40-to-50-year life span, so replacing them would be extremely costly.
Combined with increasing costs in the ingredient supply chain and domestic logistics, reducing emissions becomes a challenge.
"We are in a high inflationary environment, and cost-of-living pressures are quite real for our consumers," Ms Saliba said.
"This then means that the cost of manufacturing is something that we keep top of mind ... to make sure that we can afford those investments without passing on that increased cost to consumers."
Ms Saliba has recommended the government introduce finance instruments such as an instant asset tax write-off, rather than the grants offered under the Future Made in Australia plan.
Grants applications can be labour-intensive and businesses cannot be assured they will be offered the funding.
Instant asset write-offs, by comparison, provide financial certainty which makes them much more attractive, Ms Saliba says.
Mondelez has also maintained it was of "critical importance" that regulation and reporting requirements were not increased for industry under the government's plan.
Echoing the concerns also put forward by business groups, the Productivity Commission wrote in its submission that "off-ramps" needed to be built into the policy design and used when recipients of taxpayer cash were not delivering on outcomes.
"(Future Made in Australia) support should be time-limited and withdrawn from activities and sectors found by independent, periodic reviews not to be achieving net community benefits and their stated policy goals in a cost-effective way," it reads.
The commission says data and reasoning underlying the National Interest Framework, which will identify priority industries, should be made public.
