Town Milk Producers See Factory Working

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28541, 21 March 1958, Page 7

Town Milk Producers See Factory Working

Powdered milk rolling off ma-, chines in wide sheets like crepe paper, clattering, whirling bottles full of pasteurised milk emerging from another machine, blocks of frozen cream and hundreds and hundreds of gallons of milk and cream were among the things seen by visitors to the Kaiapoi factory of the Canterbury Dairy Farmers, Ltd., yesterday. The visitors, mainly suppliers to the company and their families, numbered about 300 for the second field day held by the company since the factory began operations late in 1954.

Addressing the visitors, Mr C. J. McFadden, the chairman of directors, said he welcomed the producers’ interest in seeing how the milk from their farms reached the consumers. Eighty per cent of the town milk producers’ work went towards local consumption The producers had a responsibility through their factory to see that milk of the highest food value reached the consumers. Since the factory opened, eight million gallons of milk had passed through, he said. For supply to Kaiapoi and Rangiora, the company had provided 750,000 gallons of pasteurised milk. The 735,000 gallons of cream produced had included 75.000 gallons deepfrozen for storage. The 100,000 bags of powdered milk produced represented about 2600 tons.

Debt-Free The company could take pride that the factory was debt-free, Mr McFadden said. That showed the wisdom of getting established when times were good, because it seemed that the peak of prices ‘had been reached, for some time.” As the visitors walked through the factory, they saw every process and had the machines and equipment explained to them. From the reception stage, where they saw the chain conveyer taking in the raw milk, and the electrically-controlled washer which washes and dries eight cans and their Lids in a minute, they went to the five cool rooms.

One of the rooms holds cream before its dispatch to the city for the Christchurch Milk Company to distribute Another nas

‘‘blizzard freezing” equipment which holds blocks of deep-frozer cream at a low temperature. The factory’s automatic milk l pasteuriser has a capacity of 500 gallons an hour. Throughout the factory there is an emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene, and nowhere wa p this more in evidence that at the bottle-washing and bottle-filling machines Putting through 3900 bottles an hour, the washer cleans and sterilises the bottles ready for the filler, which automatically rejects chipped or faulty bottles The filler will be equipped with mechanism for capping the nar-row-neck bottles with aluminium foil, when the new type of bottles are -on hand shortly Deep-Freeze Cream

Although it was not working, visitors also saw the homogeniser which reconstitutes the deepfrozen cream so that Christchurch can have cream the year round. They were told that contrary to what some persons believed, deepfreeze cream was natural cream It was merely frozen for preservation and then restored to its normal consistency by the simple homogenisation process. Nothing was added or taken away, and the only contact the cream had was with polished stainless steel plant and piping. One of the most interesting operations was the drying of the milk for powder The factory is one of three in the South Island which produces skimmed milk powder, contributing to New Zea-

land’s export trade, most of which is with the United Kingdom and Asian • countries.

Two-thirds of the company’s powdered milk is exported, all exports being arranged by the New Zealand Dairy Products Marketing Commission, which handles the trade for the whole country. The export season is from August to January, and during that time the drying machines are working up to 22 hours a day. At present, the factory is meeting the local demand. Water Removed

By mechanical evaporation of water from the skim milk, the percentage of solids-not-fat is raised from about 8.7 per cent, to 25 per cent. The concentrator takes in 900 to 1000 gallons of skim milk an hour, and reduces it to 300 gallons of concentrated skim, before passing it on to the roller driers, which extract all the remaining moisture except for a very small percentage. Rolling paper-like from the rollers, the dried milk sheets are chopped, sifted and pulverised before being weighed into poly-thene-lined sacks—Bolb for the local trade and 561 b for export. The company’s laboratory, staffed by a chemist and two technicians, provides technical assistance and laboratory services for the whole of the company’s activities as well as for the factory. Its services include routine testing for quality control in the factory. “on the farm” technical assistance for suppliers and liaison and research. In the four years the factory has been operating, about 20 investigation reports have been made, some the result of months of part-time research.