AN Adelaide Hills cheese company has teamed with an unlikely partner — a Riverland jail — for an even less likely product.
“The prison dairy supplies hospitals with low-fat milk, and had so much excess cream they were dumping it,” owner Sheree Sullivan said.
“It was amazing cream — so thick you could quenelle it. We had to ask them to thin it down so it could be poured.
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READ NOW“I’m grateful that such good food isn’t being wasted, and it’s nice to know that our arrangement may be helping someone upskill and learn about dairy.”
In turn, as part of a recycling drive, the cheesery’s whey byproduct goes to a Murray Bridge farmer for his pigs.
In 1999, to help her parents find a market for their goat milk, Ms Sullivan began teaching herself to make cheese in a tiny space in the Onkaparinga Woollen Mills at Lobethal. Within six months, one employee was needed.
Udder Delights steadily morphed from that single-bedroom-size room with a little sink, small vat and draining bench into an 1800sq/m plant housing Australia’s largest privately owned white mould cheesery.
Ms Sullivan and husband Saul, who is operations manager, now employ 40 staff “with room to grow”.
“My corner kept expanding, on the back of growth that has been between 20 and 45 per cent every year,” Ms Sullivan said, crediting “SA thinking and SA support”.
In 2006, the pair opened a cellar door and cafe in Hahndorf, but the cheesery remains in Lobethal.
They rejected ideas of robots, but gradually added equipment to ease physical pressure on their workers, such as hydraulic lifters where before the cheeses had to be turned by hand about 1000 times a day, creating risk of burnout.
“They still rake the cheese into hoops, by hand and feel,” Ms Sullivan said.
Last year, giant silos were built, so instead of lugging in 20 litre buckets to tip out by hand, milk could be pumped in. They also added a new pasteuriser and giant dishwasher.
More machinery, staff, and space had actually delivered a drop in energy bills of about 10 per cent.
The cheesemaking began with 1000 litres of milk a week, “now it’s 70,000 litres and we expect it to ramp up to 100,000 this month”, Mr Sullivan said.
The cheese wheels range from 3kg down to 50g wedges for business-class Qantas and Indian Pacific meals.
“There is repetitive work in this, but we have a culture of fun plus head-down, bum-up work ethic,” Ms Sullivan said.
“Most of our workers live locally in the Hills and we like that. They are also proud to be cheesemakers.
“There’s so much satisfaction in this job. It’s good physical work, and at the end of the day you can see and taste what you’ve made.”