Lanchester Dairies is milking drive for local goods
Oct 20 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal
A COUNTY Durham dairy which helped to pick up the pieces when the Dairy Farmers of Britain (DFB) co-operative collapsed last year is growing its business with the big supermarket chains.
Lanchester Dairies started supplying local milk to more than a dozen North East Tesco stores when the DFB Blaydon Dairy closed in June 2009 and is now in talks with the retailer to supply more shops.
Dairy general manager Barry Peacock said: “We took on 16 Tesco stores for our local milk with our local label on it, all round the North East and Teesside.
“I have been at a meeting with them and they are hoping to extend that into more stores. They’re got permission to open in Sunderland, they are opening a lot more stores here.”
And the family-owned dairy, now the largest independent in the region, is winning more business as the multinationals begin to take the local food concept more seriously.
Lanchester acts as the local hub for Asda, taking in locally sourced food and drink from regional producers for distribution to the supermarket’s North East stores. It also supplies its own milk and ice cream to 21 Asdas and sells ice cream into 15 North East Tescos.
Mr Peacock said: “They have all bought into local after spending years telling us to go away.
“Local is local. They are obviously under great pressure with their carbon footprint etc.”
The dairy, which was started in the early 1990s by brothers Bill and Geoff Austin, employs 77 people, and has a fleet of 35 delivery trucks and four milk tankers. It processes more than 22 million litres of milk annually and supplies across a 100-mile radius.
Six staff have been taken on to cope with the extra ice cream orders and more jobs are expected to be created in the new year.
“We are employing more people as we go along,” said Mr Peacock.
The dairy received advice from Business Link and a £120,000 grant from the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE) to put the infrastructure into place to cope with the increased demand following DFB’s collapse.
Mr Peacock said: “Business Link helped us incredibly when we took on the extra work. The administrator just pulled the plug and left everyone in the mire.
“When you take on that amount of extra business, you need extra silos to store the raw milk and all the relevant pipework. It was a massive help.
“Without accessing this support it would have taken two to three years to achieve the level of expansion that has taken us just one year and because of this we have been able to secure more permanent jobs already and are aiming to take on more staff.”
Business Link rural adviser Steven Urwin said: “I am delighted that Business Link was able to assist Lanchester Dairies which as well as creating new jobs has also secured processing capacity within the region.”
