Golden North prepares to open in Murray Bridge: ‘Stopwatch has started’
Managing director Dimi Kyriazis gives an update as an iconic South Australian company relocates from Laura.
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At a former cheese factory in Murray Bridge, the countdown is on.
Gone are the Beston signs and newly installed is the iconic branding of Golden North on the walls of the Maurice Road plant which will soon become the home of ice cream manufacturing in South Australia.
Inside, contractors are at work: resurfacing floors, measuring forklift routes, installing roller doors and gigantic steel tanks, and recommissioning freezer rooms with enough space to store 2300 pallets of stock.
Pacing about among it all is managing director Dimi Kyriazis.
His speech was measured but his enthusiasm and excitement were evident as he guided Murray Bridge News around the factory, which was now only weeks away from entering operation.
Ice cream production lines from Golden North’s factory at Laura, decommissioned last week, were on their way.
Still in place was the equipment the previous tenants used to manufacture award-winning cheddar and parmesan cheese; so too were the spiral fridges National Foods used to make Yoplait yoghurt there back in the 1990s.
There were tanks capable of storing half a million litres of fresh milk at a time, 20,000-litre cheese-making vats, and homogenisation and pasteurisation equipment capable of processing 10,000 litres an hour.
“It’s all ours,” Mr Kyriazis said, gesturing around.
“We own this – it’s amazing.”
Already in place are the machines which break down cream and kill bacteria in raw milk, giant cheese-making vats, cheddar processing lines, a space soon to be filled with conveyor belts and packaging equipment, and three gigantic fridge/freezers. Photos: Peri Strathearn.
The company had built up a stockpile of Giant Twins and ice cream punnets which would sustain it through three months of lost production, he said.
The cultures which had lent their flavour to Beston’s Edwards Crossing cheeses remained on site in Murray Bridge, and a two-tonne test run of cheddar had already been produced.
The challenge now: get both production lines up and running as quickly as possible.
“The stopwatch has started,” Mr Kyriazis said.
He hoped to get through testing and commissioning by August, and to officially reopen the factory with much fanfare.
The several dozen staff who will work there from the start had already been hired, including former Beston operations manager Paul Connolly, “one of the best”; one of the former cheese makers; and two holdovers who will move with the company from Laura.
By year two, Mr Kyriazis hoped, the number of employees at the factory would begin to rise.
In the meantime, he had been working with Coles, Woolworths and Metcash on distribution deals for the cheese Golden North would begin producing in Murray Bridge.
At present, 90 per cent of Australia’s cheddar cheese was made overseas, “so we have a good opportunity to … go to the market and offer them something made and processed in Australia”.
He had visited Vietnam, Hong Kong and Shanghai to seek markets for Golden North’s ice cream, cheese and milk, with encouraging results.
He had also been connecting with the Murraylands’ remaining dairy producers – the relatively few who have survived two decades of droughts, floods and plummeting commodity prices – and with Robert Brokenshire and Andrew Curtis at the SA Dairyfarmers Association.
His fervent hope was that Golden North’s arrival would be a turning point for SA’s dairy industry.
Having the factory produce two products with different shelf lives – ice cream and cheese – would make all the difference, he suggested.
Cows produced milk year-round, and Golden North would be able to buy it year-round.
“We want to encourage (farmers) to grow their milk production,” Mr Kyriazis said.
“They need to be profitable, so we need to make sure we pay an appropriate rate for milk.
“We want the farmers to be part of what we’re doing in Murray Bridge … they’ll be part of our marketing, we’ll be bringing people to their farms and we’ll be bringing them to our factory.”
With the closure of Golden North’s plant at Laura now finalised after 103 years – having finished up with a party, food, drink and live music – all eyes were now on the future of the iconic South Australian company.
It wasn’t every day that a business like this one, the state’s oldest manufacturing firm, got a chance at a fresh start.
“Like I say to our young people, they’ve got the best opportunity out of any of us, because what we’re about to go through, none of them can learn that in uni,” Mr Kyriazis said.
“We actually get to rebuild a business that’s solid.”
Watch this space.
