Friday 17 April 2015

Arla Dairy

One of a few catch up posts - we've been busy and have had some great days out and at home.

I organised a visit to the recently built Arla Dairy.  It's the largest milk processing plant in the world.  At the moment it has the capacity to process 500 million litres of milk per year, and from January 2016 that will double to 1 billion litres.  It's mind blowing!

Painted cows at the entrance.




Some of the 16 silos they use to store the milk.  Each silo can hold 1.2 million litres.


Our tour took us from where the milk is delivered, all the way through to the other end of the factory to where the bottled milk is loaded on to trucks.

A milk tanker making a delivery.  There are 13,500 farmers in the Arla Cooperative.


We spent some time in the education room, looking at a model of the factory and finding out about pasteurisation.




They have viewing areas in many of the different areas of the factory.  We were able to see the bottles being made, labelled, filled and loaded.  It was fascinating.  One thing the adults found interesting was the low numbers of people that we saw.  Most of the work is computerised or mechanised.








These are some of the products made by Arla.  They also produce the own brand milk at Tesco, Sainsburys, Aldi and Lidl.



They have a lot of trolley cages!


The yellow trolleys are computerised, and move cages of milk to the loading bay.  They use GPS technology to pick the right cage and take it to the correct location.




It was a very interesting visit.  It's our second Farm to Fork event, and I really recommend them. 

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