From Western France to the world: Lactalis's expanded UHT plant produces 1.5 million liters a day, with a portion of it bound for foreign lands

Dairy Foods, Oct, 2004 by David Phillips

VITRE, France -- There's a remarkably preserved medieval castle in this town of 25,000 about two hours west of Paris. The bastion is one of several in a latitudinal line which once formed a perimeter defense for the state of Bretagne in the heart of what is now one of France's most important agricultural and food processing regions.

This is the home of Camembert, the LeMans race course, and, in Vitre, one of the largest fluid milk plants in the country. The Groupe Lactalis facility not only produces more than 1.5 million liters of milk, baby formula, and juice daily, but it offers a bit of a history lesson as well, for anyone interested in the dairy industry.

"The very first Tetra Pak machine in France was installed in this plant in Vitre," says Plant Director Christophe Coquel, as he leads Dairy Foods on a plant visit. There are six Tetra Pak lines each producing up to 6,000 liters per hour. The historic Tetra Pak machine now makes its home in the company's Lactopole Museum in neighboring Laval (see sidebar p. 72).

The six Tetra Pak lines are complemented by four aseptic plastic lines featuring Stork blow molding equipment and Serac fillers with double clean rooms. The fourth of these lines is housed in an expanded footprint of the plant and it came on line in mid-April.

Groupe Lactalis, is the second largest dairy company in France, and the country's No. 1 exporter of dairy products. With more than $7 billion in annual revenue, it is one of the largest dairy processors in the world.

The company's most prevalent segment is cheese which accounts for nearly half its business. Founded in Laval, a stone's throw from the Vitre plant, the company's cheese portfolio is primarily camembert and brie, but it also does a good deal of business in genuine Roquefort, which is aged in the caves on France's eastern edge.

But Lactalis also sells a great deal of milk and cream, industrial dairy products and a very small amount of milk-fed veal.

At the Vitre plant, the product mix is milk, baby formula, organic milk, and small amounts of goats milk and juice.

Focused on Fluid

"When this plant was built in 1968 all French dairy plants were required to produce a full line of products." Coquel says. "But in the 1980s we began to specialize, and the Vitre plant began to focus on fluid milk products."

And oh, how it has!

The fourth plastic-bottle filling line was installed at a cost of more than EUR 16 million or approximately $19 million. Other improvements are ongoing, including an expansion to the plant's finished product storage facilities.

About 80% of European milk is sold in aseptic, shell stable packaging. Vitre is 100% UHT aseptic.

"We receive about 17 truck loads of milk per day, or about 1 million liters," Coquel says. "We run round the clock between six and seven days a week and we receive milk every day."

Raw milk is delivered by a fleet of Lactalis's own tanker trucks, most of them adorned with advertising for the company's global brand President, or its French brand Lactel.

The milk is homogenized, and fat levels are set, then it is pasteurized, and sent for storage in one of nine silos until it is needed, generally for a maximum of 24 to 36 hours. For most products the fat level is set to 1.5%, the European standard of "semi-skim."

When the stored milk is needed for filling it is then UHT treated with a Stork serpentine helicolodial system before being sent to fillers.

Let there be light, or not

The Vitre facility has another feature that's rare in U.S. dairy plants--natural light. Many rooms feature frosted glass skylights that let in a soft, diffused natural light that works in conjunction with the plant lighting. In the newest room, large plate glass windows in the walls provide a view of the French countryside while helping to provide a bright, well-lit work environment.

"Many studies have shown that employees are more productive when they have windows find natural light," Coquel says.

The individual lines are designed to execute uninterrupted runs of 36 to 48 hours, Coquel says. "Afterward we shut down and do a shift of clean in place and maintenance."

The Tetra Pak lines are configured for one-liter baseline bricks, and one-liter square top cartons. Liter packages are typically bundled in six packs, or in three packs. Depending on the products, spout fitments may be applied to cartons and handles can be incorporated in the registered photo-printed overwrap used for bundling the multipacks.

On the Serac/Stork side of the Vitre plant bottles are blown in three or six layers with a base material of while opaque HDPE. Bottles are filled in a variety of sizes ranging from quarter liter to one-liter.

While dairy employees may perform belier in a well-lighted facility, dairy products, of course, prefer to be kept in the dark. While UHT milk needs no refrigeration, it may be even more important to protect it from light during its long shelf life. For this reason, a middle layer of carbon black is included as a light barrier in all plastic packages. Some products require protection from oxygen penetration, in which case an additional layer of ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) is used in conjunction with an adhesion layer on either side of it.