SALEM, Ohio — United Dairy hopes a new milk processing machine it recently installed in its Martins Ferry, Ohio, milk processing plant will help the company sell its products to more schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, and possibly work with more farmers.
The machine, which the venerable company started using in the first week of August, produces 4 and 8 ounce units of milk, which is the size needed for school lunches and hospital meals.
The company aims to have the machine fully up and running by the time the school year starts, United Dairy Director of Human Resources Doug Longenette said.
The new machine was made possible thanks to a $2.3 million investment which was split between United Dairy, and several economic development groups, including Jobs Ohio, a nonprofit organization funded by a tax on alcohol. The bulk of the investment came from United Dairy, said Matt Abbott, president and CEO of Ohio Southeast Economic Development, a regional economic development agency that partners with Jobs Ohio.
The project is as much about supporting farmers as it is creating jobs, he said.
“With any project, we look at upstream and downstream economic potential,” Abbott said.
Longenette said he couldn’t comment yet on how much the machine will increase the company’s production capacity, and whether or not it will let United Dairy work with more farmers. Those are details the milk producer still needs to work out, Longenette said.
“We will be actively going after new business, but it’s hard to put a number on at this point,” he said.
In the meantime, the machine should help United Dairy become more efficient, Longenette said, noting that the current machine at the Martins Ferry plant is prone to breakdowns.
“The new machine that we purchased does 340 units a minute, and runs approximately 20 hours a day,” he said.
The company will keep its old machine, Longenette added.
United Dairy had just under 170 employees at the Martins Ferry facility before installing the machine. The company now has roughly 175 there now, he said.
The company works with hundreds of dairy farmers and milk co-ops throughout the Midwest and eastern United States. United was founded in 1954 and has roughly 600 employees across 10 distributions centers and milk production facilities. Its other two processing plants are in Uniontown, Pennsylvania and Charleston, West Virginia.
“We work with about 240 farmers that we buy from directly,” said Tom McCombs, a United Dairy milk procurement manager.
In addition to supplying retailers like Walmart and ALDI, United Dairy sells milk products to schools, hospitals and other institutions in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky and Virginia, he said.
The dairy industry has long been losing farmers for years. However, the remaining operations are producing more, and across the country the total amount of milk coming from American farms is generally increasing. However, Longenette noted that the institutions United Dairy works with, such as schools and prisons, aren’t going to go out of business.
