A farmer-owned Cayuga County dairy processor celebrated Wednesday the opening of a $270 million facility in Auburn.
The Cayuga Milk Ingredients facility will have 150 permanent jobs and focus on products like protein shakes, meal replacement drinks and other products that will be both shelf stable and have an extended shelf life, said CEO Brian Linney.
“We’re doing this because the farmers wanted to diversify their customer base,” he said.
Protein drinks are growing 12-13% each year, and last year, the market increased by $450 million across the United States, Linney said. Their state-of-the-art equipment will include a paper-based packaging line.
“We don't have a bottle machine, so we think we should use paper that is easier to recycle,” Linney said.
The opening of the Cayuga Milk Ingredients plant comes a little over a month after the groundbreaking for a $1 billion Chobani processing facility in Rome.
“New York is a dairy state, through and through. We have thousands of dedicated dairy farmers, producing some of the very best products in the world, and we rank number one for yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese and more,” said New York Agricultural Commissioner Richard Ball.
New York state contributed $8 million to the new facility.
Dale Mattoon, a dairy farmer from Cayuga County and chairman of the board for Cayuga Milk Ingredients, said the new processing facility is a great opportunity for dairy farmers.
“I think you’ll see some pretty rapid growth because of this processing plant being built, and the other four or five we talked about including Chobani, Fairlife and Great Lakes. A tremendous amount of processing capacity is being added in New York, and I think that provides great opportunity for dairymen in the market,” Mattoon said.
New York is the fifth most dairy producing state and generates 16 billion pounds of milk per year. The demand for bulk milk is expected to grow by 6 billion by 2030, according to a presentation by Linney during the event.
“Dairy farmers naturally grow their businesses slowly over time, with rising costs for everything else [they] try to become more efficient,” Mattoon said. “Everybody can remember maybe a great-grandfather would have had seven or 14 cows, and today the farms have thousands of cows.”
The original Cayuga Milk Ingredients plant was built in 2012 and funded by 22 farming families. About 70% of the milk comes from within 40 miles of the plant.
“This investment here is really groundbreaking because it’s just a group of 22 families that got together and built this. It’s obviously a big deal for the rest of the people, but it’s such a big deal to us because we’re just growing our business and that has had a lot of impact,” Mattoon said.
