The Rural Voice, 1998-04, Page 26Barnyard to
boardroom
Jersey producers start cheese
processing business
By Keith Roulston
Products from Quality Jersey Products Ltd.'s
new Seaforth plant sit in the cold room
waiting shipment (left). Hans Krach, (above)
has shepherded the project to completion and
is now overseeing production. Bruce Schmidt
(right, and cover) is president. (Below)
locally -trained workers clean pasteurizing
equipment.
It might have been a time to
celebrate for 40 investors in
Quality Jersey Products Ltd.
(many of them Jersey producers) but
when the first products of their new
Seaforth plant came off the line on
March 17 there was little fanfare.
Perhaps that was because it was a
relief to finally see the culmination of
five years of dreaming and hard
slugging to make their new company
come to life.
The company's plant, set up in a
former planing mill in Seaforth, will
produce specialty cheeses, produced
and packaged in traditional European
fashion and designed to replace
imports. The cheeses will be
marketed under the "Jersey
Tradition" label.
For key members of the company,
like President and Chairman of the
Board Bruce Schmidt of Walton, it
probably seems like more than five
years ago the dream was born. Back
then, as a Jersey breeder and dairy
producer Schmidt recalls being
worried about the future given the
talk about GATT negotiations and
the possible demise of supply
management. "Vertical integration
appeared to be an opportunity that if
22 THE RURAL VOICE
you don't get the money out of the
farm you get it out somewhere else in
the chain," he recalls recently just
before his long-time dream was
finally realized. "It had a way of
creating stability for the family farm
operation."
The idea took flight within the
membership of the Perth -Huron
Jersey Club when a group of 14
producers put $500 each into a pot to
look at developing differentiated
markets for the rich Jersey milk
produced by their farms. They used
the money in 1994 to hire Western
Business Consultants, part of the
University of Western Ontario's
business school, to do a feasibility
study to look at what might be viable
products and what different options
they could take to develop and
market them.
The producers' initial enthusiasm
was tested by the feasibility study
because they felt the •options
proposed required large markets for
large volumes of products to be
profitable and the producers didn't
feel that was viable. The study, for
instance, proposed a return to the old
days of pasteurized, non -
homogenized, cream topped Jersey
milk in a glass bottle as well as
different types of cream cheese.
Disappointing as the study itself
was, however, the process of the
study was a most positive
development, Schmidt says. "We
went through a process of going
through different options and we
made all these contacts within the
dairy industry and the processing
industry and some in the retailing
industry as well."
Encouraged by this, the producers
looked at a different group of
options. The networking that began
through the study paid off in May
1996, when the group met with Hans
Krach, a consultant to the cheese
industry. Krach has worked in the
cheese industry all his life, first in
Europe, then in Canada. Krach and
the producers put their heads together
to look at the possibilities for Jersey
milk in the specialty cheese market.
They started by trying to find
existing processors to work with but
with a possibility of considerable risk
involved in developing new products,
they couldn't find anyone willing to
work with them. They decided to
look at forming a co-operative to
start their own processing.