30/09/2017
Coopers Marquees were very pleased to be involved in the recent launch of Lakeland Dairies 40 million expansion of their milk drying plant.
The Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys TD also attended, together with Alo Duffy, Chairman of Lakeland Dairies, the Board and regional committees of the co-operative and Group Chief Executive, Michael Hanley. The event forms part of a series of open days where hundreds of Lakeland Dairies milk supplying farmers, and their families, are also visiting the new facility.
With 2,400 dairy farmers supplying milk to the co-operative across 15 counties north and south, Lakeland Dairies now employs over 800 people.
One of Ireland’s leading farmer owned dairy processing co-operatives, Lakeland Dairies processes over 1.2 Billion litres of farm produced milk annually into 240 value-added dairy foodservice products and food ingredients for export to over 80 countries worldwide.
This is Lakeland Dairies’ third milk drying plant at its Bailieboro processing centre. It will now produce over 160,000 tonnes of milk powders and 50,000 tonnes of butter annually on the same site, which allows great flexibility in milk throughput and overall economies of scale for the food ingredients business.
The development is designed to ensure that the co-operative is well positioned to take advantage of all future market opportunities for its milk producers. The expansion saw the installation of a new 7 tonne per hour milk dryer and evaporators where total milk powder production capacity has now increased to 20 tonnes per hour. The plant has the highest levels of efficiency including heat recovery systems and its energy centre can also supply electricity back into to the national grid.
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