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Cornell's dairy plant makes moo magic by the gallon  Cornell's dairy plant makes moo magic by the gallon There's a scrumptious aroma in the air at the Cornell Dairy Plant. The brain identifies it immediately as eau de cacao and fires off a search command. Aha! There, amid the whirring machinery, gleaming steel tubs, red-blinking […]

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Cornell's dairy plant makes moo magic by the gallon
 

Cornell's dairy plant makes moo magic by the gallon

There's a scrumptious aroma in the air at the Cornell Dairy Plant. The brain identifies it immediately as eau de cacao and fires off a search command. Aha! There, amid the whirring machinery, gleaming steel tubs, red-blinking gauges, and aqua-tiled walls, is a chocoholic's dream. A heap of mahogany powder, in a large sack upended in a stainless steel funnel, sifts its way toward a swirling vat of fresh, warm milk. A peek inside reveals a churning cauldron of foamy delight: gallons and gallons (and gallons) of Cornell chocolate milk. "I might be a little biased, but I think our chocolate milk is some of the best around," says Jason Huck, MS '06, the plant's manager. "We get a higher grade of cocoa, so it's richer than most."

There's a tempting way to confirm this claim: dive in. Unfortunately, this is not Willy Wonka's factory; the state has strict rules about swimming in the product.

And soon, such fancies will go the way of the plant's Kennedy-era freezer, its Nixon-era homogenizer, its eight-ton packaging leviathan aptly named the Tetra Rex. The plant has been operating in Stocking Hall since 1923, but the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences is currently in the final design phase of a $105 million upgrade; this antiquated shop is on its way out. In its place: a glass-fronted, state-of-the-art dairy plant—including facilities and laboratories for food and wine production— where the public will get a bird's-eye view from a balcony observatory. New equipment, including a 4,200-gallon tanker truck, has been acquired from the New York State Department of Corrections, where dairy operations once served as vocational training for inmates. The state is disbanding several of these programs, making Cornell the beneficiary of some top-of-the-line processing equipment.

Making chocolate milk 

During construction, Cornell's Dairy Bar will move to a temporary scooping station in Trillium Express on the ground floor of Kennedy Hall; it should return by 2013, somewhere near its old haunt. The cost of the project is being footed by the State University Construction Fund, with ground-breaking scheduled for September 2010. "We'll be bringing the dairy in line with where the industry is headed," says Huck, who runs an operation that processes roughly 1.5 million gallons of milk a year.

Cornell is the only Ivy that supplies dairy products for virtually its entire campus, including all dining units, the Statler Hotel, most fraternities and sororities, and numerous co-op housing units. In addition, the plant is a training site for inspectors from the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, as well as state-certified milk inspectors.

The operation is a happy marriage of animal science and food science: the raw milk (about 176,000 gallons a week) is produced by a herd of more than 800 cows at the Cornell Dairy Teaching and Research Center, twenty miles east of Ithaca in Harford, New York, then hauled to the plant via tanker truck. Five workers handle the plant's entire operation, with help from a couple of student employees during the school year. All staff are trained to repair any piece of equipment in the event of a breakdown. If someone calls in sick, Huck puts on his rubber boots, whites, and a hair net and gets to work.

Each year, about 145,000 gallons of fluid milk products are produced, along with 19,000 gallons of ice cream, much of it sold out of the Dairy Bar. (Sales by the scoop ring up about 50 percent of the unit's annual profits.) There are seven flavors of yogurt and two kinds of pudding (4,000 gallons a year total); the plant also reconstitutes orange juice from Florida (16,000 gallons annually) and, in the fall, pasteurizes and packages more than 30,000 gallons of apple juice and cider from Cornell Orchards. The plant also produces sorbet, lemonade, cranapple juice, even soy milk. About 95 percent of the output is consumed on campus. "The hours are similar to working on a farm," says Huck, noting that computerized upgrades will make some aspects of the job less hands-on. "On the days when we're processing, we start at about 4 a.m. and don't stop until we're finished."

At 1.5 million gallons annually, Cornell is not the biggest dairy producer among the nineteen members of the University Creamery Managers' Association. Top honors, at 4 million gallons, go to the University of Wisconsin.

— Franklin Crawford

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