Expansion Continues
Trades are thinning out and inside our newly expanded Milk Enhancement Centre is a hive of activity as new equipment is installed to help increase production.
The number of tradies working on the expansion of the milk factory on a daily basis is dropping rapidly and we are getting near the pointy end of the stick.
What a surprise- everything has gone over budget. Usually when I work on a capital project I make sure I can handle up to 30 per cent overruns before I proceed. We are breaking those self-imposed limits at the moment.
If I was being hard on myself I’d say, blind Freddie could have seen this coming and isn’t the definition of an idiot someone who makes the same mistakes over and over?
If I was being kind to myself I’d say we are doing a high quality commercial job that should set us up for the next 10 years.
Kindness is the go!
It’s unlikely you will see new products on the shelf before Christmas, but I think in three weeks we will be firing up the new continuous flow pastueriser for commissioning.
We turned over the milk separator last week and it did what it was told. It spins at approximately 11,000 revolutions per minute, so if it comes loose I will need my road runner shoes on.
One of our challenges from the get go has been that the clay particles on our farm are smaller than the fat particles in the milk, so it’s really difficult to filter those impurities out.
This should resolve the issue and hopefully give us more shelf life stability, especially after wet weather events.
The new homogeniser was not doing what it should and I apologise if you got a dodgy bottle-that’s totally on me. In this gig where you are selling food direct, any failures are very public.
It’s really valuable and important to us that people let us know if they have a substandard product so we can assess and act if needed. If it’s a food safety issue we would issue an immediate recall and pull product from the shelves. If it’s a food presentation issue (which it was in this case) we have to make a decision and because of the Melbourne Cup holiday we were too far through the cycle to make a difference.
Usually we mix the chocolate in the milk and then homogenise but to try and get a bit mor efficiency we homogenised the milk and then added the chocolate. That didn’t work out so well and any lumps of cream through the chocolate milk is totally on me.
Why wouldn’t you try any process change on a small scale in a laboratory (which we now have-yay) instead of doing it in a whole batch first up?
Could I be any sillier? Yes is the answer. So sorry, sorry, sorry, have I damaged our brand with our customers? Yes of course. Have I damaged our brand with the retail stores we deal with-? Yes of course.
Will we recover? I hope so!
When we first started bottling milk if we had sent out some product that wasn’t perfect, I would want to lock myself in a dark room, and I would feel physically sick because I’d made a substandard food product.
Now I don’t want to say I’ve become acclimatised to stuff ups, but I’ve sort of worked out that my place is to put as many safeguards in place as we can to make sure our product is top shelf, and if something goes astray, my place is to manage the process of identification, assessment and action taken.
Does it make it feel any better? No, but I have a path to follow. If all of this ever gets operational I will need to go on a sales campaign in Melbourne to get new customers. I can’t stand Melbourne, actually anywhere with more than about 30 people but I will do it because weirdly I still believe in what we are doing, that we can make it work, that long-term it could be a really good thing for Lake Boga.