Jim Gosier has to shout to be heard over the engines and steam boilers at Byrne Dairy’s newly reconfigured South Cortland plant.
“This whole part of the building right here is new for ESL (extended shelf life) production,” Gosier yelled, motioning to a large square portion of the plant that protruded out its southern side. “Steam is key to ESL production, and there are several boilers in there that move steam.”
The Byrne Dairy processing plant in Cortlandville – opened in 2014 to make yogurt – has been retooled to produce extended shelf life dairy products from milk sourced within a 25-mile radius, which representatives from the company reported, widely extended the range of their product.
“Byrne has been around, making dairy products for 90 years,” Byrne representative Gosier said in May. “It came to this site in 2014 and built this facility as a cultured dairy plant, making yogurt, sour cream, and stuff like that. We found that after doing that for a little less than eight years, the market was just saturated and dominated by national players.”
Realizing Byrne could not compete in the saturated national and international cultured dairy market, the company announced in 2021 the $25 million retooling of its Cortlandville facility, which was completed in October, installing extended shelf life product processing and filling lines in place of its cultured product lines.
“We built this plant in 2014 with the idea of bringing people in to see the process,” Gosier said. “I’ve been in a lot of dairy plants in this country and in other countries, and I have not seen one like there where it’s designed so you could see how it works from outside the process.”
INTAKE
Gosier and Byrne Sales and Marketing Specialist Ashley Casey walked out of the plant’s administrative offices to tour the plant in May.
Walking up a long set of stairs to the upper mezzanine of the plant, Gosier and Casey could see each step of the process that would allow milk sourced from nearby farms to last as it’s shipped across the East Coast.
“Right below us is a small lab called a wall lab,” Gosier said, pointing toward a suspended walkway above a large tanker bay that receives milk for the plant. “The technician will come out on that gantry way there, open the top of the tank and pull out a sample, go in and start testing the milk to make sure it meets quality standards. When the lab technician gives us a thumbs up, that's when we start pumping the milk in for processing.”
Rather than traditionally pasteurized milk, which heats the milk to 140 degrees for 40 seconds, Byrne’s process in Cortlandville heats it to 280 degrees for five seconds, Gosier said. The end product lasts much longer than traditional pasteurization – it lasts 10 to 20 weeks with refrigeration.
Before it gets to that point, lab technicians test the unprocessed milk for pathogens, drug residue, antibiotics and excess bacteria, rejecting milk that doesn't meet Byrne’s safety and quality criteria.
“It’s actually fairly rare that a load gets rejected, and part of that is the farms that we work with – they’re clean, fresh, and don’t let the milk sit around for days before shipping it,” Gosier said.
The plant sources its milk from up to 25 miles away, but on a good day, milk travels as few as six miles to reach it, he said. It has not sourced milk from additional farms as a result of the retooling, rather, the farms it sources from have added additional cows.
“We’re very fortunate that we're in a very good milk-shed, as they call it,” Gosier said. “Farmers like to milk more cows wherever they can. There’s plenty of milk locally, if we really needed to go outside the area, we could – but we really don't see the need to.”
Gosier said Byrne’s Dewitt plant rejected only one load in the past two years, and that rejected milk would be dumped, usually in the manure pit of the farm that supplied it.
HOMOGENIZE, STERILIZE, STORE AND BATCH
After the milk is pumped from a shipping tanker, it will be stored in stainless-steel cold storage tanks to be batched, homogenized and sent to a processing line.
“We don’t want anything sitting around,” Gosier said. “By state regulation, we’ve got to do something with the milk within 72 hours. We make milk and cream in quarts and half-gallons. In the last three days, we’ve made 64,000 half-gallons and 243,000 quarts.”
Gosier looked down toward the factory floor, where workers operated batching machines, and a homogenizer separated milk fat from liquid milk.
“When milk comes off the farm, it’s non-homogenized, the cream separated from the milk. The homogenizer puts it under pressure and forces the liquid and fat molecules together,” he said.
Once milk is homogenized, it runs through a sterilizer, which kills excess bacteria in the milk through pasteurization. Then it’s stored in sterile tanks.
“This is the room that’s changed the most in the retooling,” Gosier said, looking at the facility's largest set of stainless steel tanks in its batching room. “That was a batching room before that we used to batch up yogurt and sour cream, and it didn't have the sterilizer or homogenizer.”
Gosier said that all pumps, machinery and tanks in the facility are cleaned automatically, using a food-grade detergent that is washed out before production.
PACKAGING AND SHIPPING
After the milk is sterilized, it’s stored until it’s packed in the last room that Gosier and Casey visited during the tour, the packaging room, where assembly lines zip filled bottles into boxes being robotically assembled, and the milk is tested a second time.
Gosier said that Byrne has invested $5 million on top of the initial $25 million to buy new filling machines that have increased the facility's output.
“Our pasteurized lab is like a full laboratory, microscopes, Petri dishes and whatnot,” Gosier said. “When the batching people think it’s ready, they bring a sample to the lab, which measures the amount of butterfat and water in there before it can go into the package.”
Lab technicians also test milk in a hot room, a 90-degree room meant to stimulate bacterial growth, so they can test how the milk may react to high temperatures in shipping.
THE DIFFERENCE
“The difference between regular milk and extended-shelf life is that, although you do need to refrigerate it, depending on the product, it will have a shelf life of 70 to 150 days,” Gosier said. “So still a lot better than the gallon of milk you’ll pick up at the grocery store, which lasts a couple of weeks, hence the name.”
Gosier said that some people claim there is a different taste to aseptic or extended shelf life milk as opposed to standard milk, but that’s unlikely to be noticed if the milk is mixed with other ingredients before consumption.
“Extended shelf life is long shelf life, but aseptic is even longer shelf life,” Gosier said. “We don’t do aseptic processing here, we do that at our plant in Dewitt, making milk and cream products aseptically.
Those products do not have to be refrigerated, and have a shelf-life of up to a year, so they can literally go around the world.”
Gosier said that extended shelf life and aseptic versions could be made of all fluid dairy products, but cultured products like yogurt and cheese could not benefit from the process.
“To make it extended shelf life, you kill everything that’s in it,” he said. “Cheese is already extended shelf life compared to other dairy products, and without bacteria, you couldn’t exactly make yogurt.”
“When we got into ESL in 2004, that really extended our reach because we were able to ship our products throughout the East Coast,” Gosier said. “Aseptic has taken that and now we’re out west, we’re in the Caribbean, we’re in Central America. It’s exciting.”
“I was in the Virgin Islands in December, walked into a store, and there was a Byrne Dairy half and half,” Gosier said. “There are some places that will never accept aseptic, but some of our customers will keep it in the same cooler in stores, so to the end customer, it looks virtually the same.”
