Wellington, Oct 12 NZPA - Fonterra says the robotics company, Inro -- with which it has worked to create robotic forklift trucks -- is now "commercial".

"We're now in a position where the company is commercial and we're selling the product internationally," Fonterra's general manager strategy in its trade and operations arm, Nigel Jones, told a forestry sector conference in Wellington today.

""I was up until some ridiculous hour last night on video conferences to Europe with various parties wanting to take the solution further," he said.

Mr Jones used the robotic forklifts as an example for the foresters of how an existing solution could be delivered in a better, more cost-effective way.

"It highlights how you can innovate, deliver value to the supply chain, and at the same time create new commercial models," he said as a video played of a forklift fetching pallets of product, and neatly lining them up as it stacked the pallets.

"There's one thing missing off that forklift -- the driver," he told the ForestWood conference.

"We're looking at it to work in the food industry overseas and different sectors in Australia and the USA.

"We've got to the point where forklift manufacturers are actually giving us forklifts," he said. The world's biggest forklift manufacturer gave the company a new forklift free of charge recently and asked for it to check whether the machine was "Inro -capable" because a one of its big clients wanted to be able operate such technology in its warehouses.

"A supply chain isn't about just moving the physical product -- you've got to think outside the square and deliver a lot more for a lot less," Mr Jones said.

Mr Jones is a director of Inro's shareholder, and Fonterra owns nearly 14 million of that company's 31.8m shares.

Developed from a 2005 entrepreneurial challenge at Auckland University, with taxpayer-funded science grants, Inro attracted Fonterra's attention because it was capable of retro-fitting existing forklifts.

Fonterra took an initial 32 percent stake in the company by investing $1.5m of its $3m start-up capital, but has since contributed to a further $4m capital-raising.