26 | South Canterbury: Fonterra - Clandeboye T T Richard Loader From little things big things grow T T to page 28 REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT 03 684 9118 • tom@activerefrig.co.nz design / install / service / maintenance PROUD TO SUPPORT FONTERRA - CLANDEBOYE Visit Timaru Heating Centre Show Room at 10 Dee Street www.breenplumbing.co.nz www.timaruheatingcentre.co.nz Located near Temuka and surrounded by South Canterbury dairy farms, Clandeboye is one of Fonterra’s largest milk processing plants, manufacturing a diverse range of products for the global export markets, including mozzarella cheese. Appearing from the vast pastoral landscape as a complex assemblage of shining stainless steel structures, Clandeboye’s modern milk processing plant is steeped in a history reflective of the region’s growth in dairy farming, its solid roots stepping back to 1904 when it was founded as a milk skimming station by a small group of local farmers. Back in the day, cream was skimmed off raw milk to produce butter, with the rest of the milk generally reserved as animal feed. In the ‘70s and ’80s, many of the smaller syndicated milk factories around the country began to merge operations for the sake of efficiency, and Clandeboye came under the mantle of Alpine Dairy Products. Evolution continued during the region’s dairy boom in the ‘90s, with Dryers One and Two built to meet the growing supply of raw milk and demand for processing capacity. By the time Fonterra was formed in 2001 Clandeboye was a dry salt cheese plant, manufacturing butter, Anhydrous Milk Fat (AMF), whey protein, lactose and had a skim milk powder dryer, says Site Operations Manager Ross Burdett. “Our biggest milk powder dryer was commissioned in 2004, a 27 tonne per hour whole milk powder plant. In 2007 we opened the first mozzarella cheese plant, followed by Mozzarella Two in 2015, and Mozzarella Three in 2018.” Over the last 22 years, Clandeboye has grown from processing three million litres of milk over a 24-hour period at peak, to now just over thirteen million litres. While Fonterra’s Whareoa plant in north Taranaki processes almost sixteen million litres over a 24-hour period at peak, Ross says the manufacture of mozzarella cheese at Clandeboye adds an extra level of complexity and scale. About 900 central South Island farms supply milk to Fonterra, the majority going to Clandeboye, which processes around 40% of Fonterra’s South Island milk supply. A fleet of seventy tankers based at Clandeboye collectively travel 15 million kilometres a year collecting 2.6 billion litres of milk from farms right across the Mackenzie Basin, down through to Ranfurly and as far as north of Christchurch. From the raw milk delivered to plant each day a diverse range of products are manufactured including cheese products like mozzarella, whole milk powder, skim milk powder or milk protein concentrate. “We produce a co-product of whey off all our cheese processes, which we dry to a whey protein concentrate. From our fat streams we produce unsalted butter and AMF. The best way to describe AMF is that it is what makes M&M’s and Mars Bars taste so good. It is 99.9% fat and goes into a lot of confectionary products.” Making use of innovative technology, Clandeboye is the only dairy manufacturer in the world producing frozen mozzarella in just six hours, when it is normally a three-month process. “That process innovation can be attributed to the dedicated team at the Fonterra Research Development Centre at Palmerston North, who worked with in-house experts to develop the process first introduced in 2007,” says Ross. 7 Theodosia Street, Timaru 7910 03 684 7730 coatings@ranger.co.nz Expert team Expert knowledge Quality results Here at Ranger Specialist Coatings we provide top quality painting and specialist coating services across the industrial,commercial & residential sectors. Proud to support Fonterra - Clandeboye Site Operations manager Ross Burdett in front of one of the 70 tankers based at Clandeboye.
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