What Lactalis knows

One news item that caught my eye last week was the report in in Northern Ontario Business, which discussed the shuttering by Lactalis Canada of a plant-based beverage factory in Ontario, which had just reopened the previous year.

In the report, the plant was previously a production and distribution centre for Lactalis fluid milk, which was shut down in 2022 for conversion to plant-based brand, Enjoy! It reopened in April 2024 with C$1.4 million (€870,000) in governmental funding from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation. It will now close with the loss of 25 jobs in December.

In the meantime, over the border in New York, they are busily opening up more dairies to provide both jobs and products to consumers. As www.newyorkdairy.co explains, its farms produce over 15 billion pounds of dairy products per year, and New York ranks first in the production of cottage cheese, yogurt and sour cream. My home state does me proud by being the base for Chobani (a yogurt enterprise founded and run by Turkish immigrant Hamdi Ulukaya) and over 3,500 farms that support 183,000 dairy related jobs across the state.

In fact, Lactalis USA is expanding its plants in New York. In June, Lactalis USA announced the investment of $75 million (€64 million) to upgrade two manufacturing sites in Buffalo and Walton. Walton makes sour cream and cottage cheese, while Buffalo produces various types of cheese and whey powder. This is in addition to other recent investments, and by 2027, the dairy giant is expected to spend $123 million in Buffalo alone.

It does go to show that the nutritious facts about dairy often arrive more slowly than the popular news about the benefits of various alternatives to dairy. Lactalis as an industry giant and goes to where the money and the potential for gain for both consumers and health is, which means dairy.

https://www.governor.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Proclamation-Dairy-Month.pdf

• Suzanne Christiansen, editor, Dairy Industries International.
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