Words Denise Irvine, Images Ashlee De Caires
Ask Julie Langley to name her favourite Tatua product and she replies in an instant: “Cooking cream. It is great for butter chicken, and last night I made a chicken and broccoli bake with it. It’s richer than regular cream and it doesn’t split. It has a smooth and lovely texture and it’s only eighteen per cent milk fat.”
Julie is in her kitchen on Oakland dairy farm at Tatuanui, near Morrinsville, this Friday morning, in clear view of Tatua Co-operative Dairy Company’s site where the cooking cream and many other products are made.
In a perfect gate-to-plate story, the 300 Friesian-cross cows grazing in the pasture surrounding Julie’s house are part of Tatua’s supply chain. Their milk takes a short tanker trip to return in delicious forms, including the cooking cream and Tatua’s legendary dairy whip, developed and marketed since the late 1970s. As we speak, Julie is topping a plate of jammy scones with dairy whip for morning tea. This is a keeper in her fridge, too.
Julie and husband Kieran Langley are among the 101 Tatua shareholders on supply farms within a 12km radius of the factory at Tatuanui. The farmer-owned co-operative is 111 years old, established in 1914. It is New Zealand’s oldest independent dairy co-op, it has never been part of a merger or acquisition, and it doesn’t sell milk, butter or cheese.
Instead, Tatua has a value-added strategy and a strong history of innovation, turning milk into many different products, exporting over 90 per cent of these to markets in China, Japan, the US and others. As well as its cream-based products, specialised dairy ingredients are a big part of Tatua’s output and these include nutritional ingredients such as dairy proteins and dairy flavours for B2B (business-to-business) clients worldwide.
Today we’re talking to Julie and Kieran about Tatua, and the pride that they have for this unique Waikato dairy operation and, later, at the factory we’re meeting staff members at the newly expanded foods plant that’s been built to keep up with national and international demand.
The $85 million expansion is Tatua’s largest investment to date, creating 33 new jobs across the site and vastly increasing the capacity of the plant which produces its cream-based consumer and food service products such as sour cream, crème fraîche, mascarpone, whipping cream and the cooking cream that is on high rotation in Julie Langley’s kitchen.
“Tatua is a lifestyle for us and it is the business we chose to be in,” says Julie. “We are a small company doing big things.”
“And doing it well,” adds Kieran. He says whenever a decision is made it is always about what’s best for Tatua, and then individual shareholders. “If Tatua does well, the shareholders will do well. There is so much history here and it’s our duty to keep it going.”
Kieran and Julie have been share-milking at Oakland for 16 years. As well, they own a 60ha farm nearby which supplies Tatua and there is a contract milker on this property.
Kieran didn’t start out wanting to be a farmer. He grew up in Hamilton and studied environmental planning at Waikato University, where he met and later married Julie Townsend, from a four-generation Tatua family, who was doing a Bachelor of Communication Studies at Waikato.
Kieran subsequently changed tack and went farming, getting his first break with then-Tatua director Kevin Old, who took him and Julie on as lower-order share-milkers.
Kieran is still grateful to Kevin for giving him his first farming opportunity (with no experience). It was the springboard to the position at Oakland, owned by Terry and Karen Semmens, where Kieran and Julie have lived happily ever after in a gracious 100-year-old homestead, raising their children Taylor (16), Lucia (14) and Alana (11).
Julie is a Tatua director and she previously worked in marketing for the company. Her parents, Barry and Shirley Townsend, and her brother Glenn, are all Tatua shareholders on farms in the district. “I’m very local,” says Julie.
Julie and Kieran love the tight-knit Tatua community of shareholding families and more than 500 employees, and they say there is huge support for nearby Tatuanui School and other local activities. “There are many layers to our community and there is a lot of contact among families and factory staff,” says Julie.
“Good people before us have made bold decisions. We honour that. It is very collaborative, and your opinion and your voice does count. There is a huge amount of buy-in.”
Across the road at the factory, there are similar sentiments from Tatua employees Fiona McLeod and Katie Rowling, both in the expanded foods plant where cream-based consumer and food service products are made. “All the yummy things,” says Fiona. The velvety textured sour cream is her favourite and Katie’s is the whipped chocolate mousse.
Fiona is the plant’s production technologist and has been at Tatua for 15 years; her mother saw the job advertised when Fiona was working in the UK and it brought her home. Katie, in her tenth year, is the process manager, employed straight out of university after working for Tatua as a student in her holidays.
The foods plant runs 24/7, with 99 staff working across four shifts. “We’re a really close team,” says Katie, “and we’re good at what we do.”
Fiona says the beauty of a small company is that everyone knows everyone, people talk to each other all the time and there is a lot of collaboration among the different departments.
The previous foods plant was expanded in 2011. It quickly reached capacity and the huge demand for its products from restaurants, bakeries and beverage outlets throughout Australasia, as well as home cooks, saw the development of the state-of-the-art premises that opened in August.
“We couldn’t meet demand. It was a good problem to have,” says Fiona. “Now we are almost doubling production.”
While core products remain the same, the new premises have provided an opportunity for more robotic and automation technology in the plant. Fiona says this has been a significant change, especially in areas that had involved manual handling.
She and Katie have done all the interviews and recruitment for new staff. At front of mind for them is that the Tatua way is “everyday good people who go above and beyond”.
“We have pride in our work and we continue the legacy,” says Fiona. “It is a multi-generational company and we are hiring second generations,” says Katie.
Which fits neatly with farmers Julie and Kieran Langley’s take on Tatua: everyone on the same page, from pasture to product.
