By RNZ

Ever wondered what goes on in one of those huge dairy factories dotted around rural New Zealand?

One of Fonterra’s largest plants at Darfield on the Canterbury Plains processes around 7.5 million litres of milk each day, at peak times.

Its specialty is cream cheese destined for China and Southeast Asia.

The Darfield factory employs about 330 people and collects milk from farms around the South Island, from the Mackenzie Country in the south to Murchison in the north - producing about 270,000 tonnes of milk powder and cream cheese each year.

It lays claim to the largest whole milk powder dryer in the world, drying about 33 tonnes an hour, according to Darfield’s cream cheese manager Matt Smith.

The plant opened in 2012, producing milk powder first, followed in 2018 by cream cheese.

Fonterra’s other cream cheese plant at Te Rapa in Waikato did not have enough capacity to satisfy growing global demand.

Darfield produces 100 tonnes of cream cheese a day from milk, cream, a starter culture and a stabiliser to help hold the moisture.

“We’re trying to keep that ‘cultured’ flavour in while making it in bulk,” Smith said.

“Creamy mouth-feel, nice and fatty.”

 
Fonterra's Darfield plant manager Matt Smith, in the cream cheese blending room. Photo / RNZ, Cosmo Kentish-Barnes

The cream cheese is poured, while still hot, into 20kg cardboard cartons lined with plastic bags.

Just five people run the highly automated cream cheese line, which runs “basically 24/7”.

Twenty-kilogram boxes of cream cheese at Fonterra's Darfield factory. One hundred tonnes of cream cheese is made each day for Asian markets. Photo / RNZ, Cosmo Kentish-Barnes

After rapid cooling, the cartons are stacked and moved by robots and automated forklifts, which whizz around the factory floor tooting just as if a human were at the helm.

The cream cheese is stored in great stacks in a chilled area of the plant before being exported to China, Japan and Southeast Asian countries, where it is in hot demand for sweet dairy-topped tea, pastries and cakes.

“We can’t make enough cream cheese at the moment,” Smith said.

- RNZ