Tasty, Green Milk
Tasty, Green MilkGetting Oakhurst’s milk products into your shopping cart requires a cool, convoluted, environmentally-conscious trip from the dairy farm to the dairy case.
This may be the busiest three acres in Portland.
“It’s actually closer to two and a half,” says Bill Bennett, president and CEO of Oakhurst Dairy, as he walks across a small parking lot between buildings. “We get a lot done in a small area.”
A few meters away, midmorning traffic speeds by along busy Forest Avenue, past coffee shops and convenience stores, onto and off nearby Interstate 295. Most of the drivers ignore the four white tanks pointing to the sky, or have grown so used to their presence they no longer note them. But what’s in those silos could be on their cereal tomorrow morning.
There might not be a cow within miles. But the milk is moooooooving.
Oakhurst processes 120,000 gallons of milk a day. It arrives in tank trucks from 72 dairies within a 120-mile radius of Portland, and it departs in gallons and half-gallons and quarts and pints in refrigerated trucks for stores, restaurants, schools, and businesses all over northern New England.
In between, the milk is tested, pumped into silos, pasteurized, homogenized, pumped into holding tanks, packaged, positioned in storage coolers, and finally ferried onto the trucks that take it out into the world. This all happens on a piece of land smaller than a city block. Oakhurst makes it work by using every available amount of space—from the roof, where solar panels heat water for washing delivery crates, to the ground beneath the parking lot, where milk travels along a conveyor belt through a tunnel to one of the two coolers.
Bill Bennett is a tall, robust man with a full head of white hair who bears a passing resemblance to the late actor Peter Graves. Bennett’s “mission impossible” is to stay competitive as a family operation in a dairy market increasingly dominated by large conglomerates.
“It’s a competitive market, and we’re very fortunate to be in our 90th year and still own the business,” he says. “My grandfather started it back in 1921, with the help of the Cushman family, who ran Cushman’s Bakery. They helped put up the money so that he could buy a small dairy down the street. Back then there were probably 50 dairies in Portland. If you had a farm, you had a dairy.”
Today, Oakhurst’s primary competition comes from HP Hood and from Dean Foods, owner of the Garelick brand of milk products. Oakhurst has survived by carving out a reputation as Maine’s most environmentally conscious dairy. The solar panels on the roof testify to that, as does the company’s pledge that its milk has always been and will always be free of artificial growth hormone. Ten percent of pretax profits are donated to children’s and environmental organizations.
The family business suffered a blow earlier this year when longtime CEO Stanley Bennett II died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 64. He took over as president of Oakhurst in 1983 following the retirement of his father, Donald Bennett, son of the original Stanley Bennett, who started the dairy in 1921.
Now Oakhurst is being run by Stanley’s brothers Bill and John Bennett. Bill is president and chief executive officer; John is vice president of operations. A sister, Althea Bennett McGirr, is director of customer relations; another sister, Jean Bennett Driscoll, is executive assistant.
Under Stanley’s leadership, Oakhurst solidified its reputation as an environmental leader. In 2008, the dairy received the Carbon Challenge Award from the governor’s office.
“Stan was really keen on environmental issues,” says Bill Bennett, who took over as CEO upon his brother’s death. “We’ve been a leader; we have been for years. It’s getting harder and harder to differentiate ourselves from the competition, though, because we find that the competition has decided over the last 10 years to mimic Oakhurst.”
In 2003, Oakhurst stood up to agribusiness giant Monsanto Foods for the right to label their milk as artificial growth hormone-free. Monsanto’s lawsuit against Oakhurst (for allegedly implying on its labels that milk produced with artificial growth hormone is unhealthy) attracted the attention of Time magazine and other national media. Oakhurst retained the right to keep its “Farmers’ Pledge” label on its packaging, albeit with a disclaimer. In 2008, Monsanto announced that it was getting out of the artificial growth hormone business, which the Bennett family hailed as vindication.
Though Oakhurst sells other products, such as fruit juice and iced teas, milk remains the company’s bread and butter. “Basic milk items are 85% of our business,” Bill Bennett says. “Of that, probably 65% is gallons and half-gallons.”
The milk comes daily from 72 independent Maine farms via tanker trucks. An individual truck holds 6,200 to 6,500 gallons of raw milk, according to Joshua Goodwin, who works in the receiving bay. The trucks are backed into the bay, where the floor is tilted slightly so that gravity can do some of the work of off-loading. Goodwin and his colleagues will do a quick inspection of the load and record its temperature, and samples of each load are sent to the lab for testing.
“We take a sample from every single farm,” Bill Bennett says. “One of the things we do is run a very quick antibiotics test. There’s no tolerance for antibiotics in milk. Once in a blue moon, a cow is being treated, and they haven’t segregated it from the herd properly, and it gets milked. If we detect any of that, we’ll refuse the load.”
Kassie Turner is a technician in the testing laboratory. “We test all of our producers’ milk about four times a month for things like butterfat level and protein,” she says. “We do all kinds of different testing, and based on that, farmers are paid extra incentives, to ensure that their farms are keeping up with proper sanitation.”
Oakhurst relies heavily on SNAP tests provided by another Portland-area company recently profiled in Maine Ahead (see “Testing the World,” April 2011). “We’ve had a long relationship with IDEXX over the years,” Bill Bennett says.
Once the milk passes muster, it’s pumped off into one of four 40,000-gallon milk silos, which are superinsulated. “They’re not refrigerated, but they’re insulated to the point where the milk never varies more than a degree on the hottest and coldest days of the year,” Bennett says.
From the silos, the milk is funneled into the processing room, where it goes through pasteurizers and homogenizers and where flavorings are added to chocolate milk and other flavored products. Then it’s pumped into 13 holding tanks. It’s a full-time job for two shifts to get the milk from those holding talks into containers, storage coolers, and out onto delivery trucks.
“We’re working off those 13 tanks all day, and many of those tanks have more than one product in them during the day, because we have more than 13 products,” Bennett says. “They’re washed and rinsed in between each use. From there, when the filler is ready, the milk is directed by our computer system, which controls valves directing milk to the specific fillers.”
The process is highly automated and computerized. Unraveling the system of conveyor belts that move milk in and around and under the Oakhurst facility would be a bit like laying out the human digestive system end to end. Much of the process is ingenious in subtle ways. For instance, either four gallons or nine half-gallons slide neatly into the square plastic carriers that college students once readily stole to store their vinyl record albums. The half-gallon machine can fill 121 containers a minute; the gallon machine, 90, though Bennett says, “We can get it up to 100 if we have to.”
Oakhurst uses the plastic gallon and half-gallon containers that have been industry standard for years. “It’s a good, economical, efficient package,” Bennett says. “There are some caseless gallons out there [gallons that don’t require plastic cases for transport] that people have tried, but they never really caught on. They don’t pour very well, and they’re very expensive, because you have to use enough plastic to make them rigid.”
The gallon and half-gallon containers are made on-site by Consolidated Container Company, which leases a building adjacent to the older of the two coolers. The popular round 16-ounce containers, sold at convenience stores, are made by the same company at its plant in Massachusetts and trucked to Portland, as well as the 34-ounce (quart) and 10-ounce containers.
Paul Connolly, vice president of systems and logistics, who also serves as the company’s CIO, is responsible for many different systems that control milk movement throughout the plant. “After the milk leaves the filler systems, it passes through equipment that places it in plastic dairy cases and then stacks them six high,” Connolly explains. “All the milk is stored in a manner that guarantees that the milk is rotated according to the date it was
produced.”
Connolly was also instrumental in the design of the new $8 million cooler that was built in 2005. The new high-tech cooler more than doubled the amount of on-site storage capacity. Before the new cooler was built, Bennett says, “It would get to the point where we actually had to stop production, load trucks, and then start up again, because we didn’t have anyplace to put the milk.” Oakhurst owned the land next door, and had leased it to Pizza Hut. “We sort of encouraged them to move,” Bennett says. “Then we went ahead and developed that land, and built a new milk cooler.”
“We would actually prefer that it be one cooler, because two coolers create a bit of a logistical nightmare,” Connolly says. “At some point in the future, we might be able to expand that cooler and close the old cooler, and it would be a more efficient operation.”
To solve those logistical problems, Oakhurst uses every bit of available space, including under the ground. Milk is moved from the processing plant to the old cooler via a 210-foot tunnel approximately 10 feet below the surface of the parking lot, six feet wide and eight feet high, through which the entire Boston Celtics roster could walk comfortably upright. “The most direct route is a straight line,” Connolly says. “When the milk comes out of the plant, it goes onto a ‘lowerator,’ which is the opposite of an elevator; then it travels under the parking lot, and rises up on an elevator over there.”
Despite the space constraints, the dairy seems likely to remain in its present location for the foreseeable future. The convenience of more land is outweighed by the cost of moving the whole operation, Bennett says.
“It would have been great to be able to design your ultimate dairy plan and build it,” Connolly says, “but you have to build it with an eye toward keeping the current plant running while you’re doing your construction. At the time, we would have needed much more land than we had next door to build a cooler that would encompass everything.”
Perhaps no part of the operation is as crucial as the network of trucks that deliver Oakhurst’s products to market. Currently, the fleet of owned and leased vehicles includes 21 tractors, 69 trailer trucks, and 59 single-unit delivery trucks. Oakhurst employs 91 drivers. The delivery area includes all of Maine, plus expanding territories in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
Delivery routes are based at five depots, in Portland, Waterville, Bangor, Hooksett, New Hampshire, and Lakeville, Massachusetts. Connolly designed the computer software that enables Oakhurst to continually update its routes for maximum time and fuel efficiency.
“We’re in the process of doing a complete rerouting of our delivery infrastructure,” he says. “One consideration is that certain customers have certain times that we can and cannot deliver to them. You have to pick delivery windows for each customer. The software system makes suggestions on how to deliver the least amount of routes with the most miles per route given the time parameters.”
The system is completely integrated, so that milk can be tracked accurately from cooler to final delivery point. Drivers and warehouse personnel use handheld computers that can be run along cables inside the coolers to keep their hands free and to prevent the computers from getting banged around too much. Everything’s tied into a central system.
“One of our biggest accomplishments over the past two years is that we implemented a GPS solution in every one of our delivery trucks,” Connolly says. “Rather than buying an external software system, which would have been very expensive, we developed it in-house.”
The GPS telemetry links up with the driver’s handheld computer. “If I’m a driver and I leave the facility at, say, two in the morning, I scan a bar code at the office when I leave, and that stamps the time I’m starting my route. I scan another bar code in my truck that links me to the truck. I enter my mileage, then it clears my GPS telemetry, and I leave for the day. Every five seconds, the GPS system in the truck makes a blip on the map. It knows how fast I’m driving; it knows the route I’m taking; it knows how long I’m stopped. And at the end of the day when I’m all done, I again scan the bar code in the truck and enter the mileage.”
The magic, Connolly says, happens when all that data is processed by their main software system, where it matches the driving and all the stops with the
actual sales that are on the computer. “You can really look at where your delays are and figure out solutions.”
“Fuel prices have a huge effect on us, as you might imagine,” Bill Bennett says. “We’re doing everything we can to squeeze the size of our delivery route
system.”
What’s next for Oakhurst? “Right now, there’s no fourth generation working here yet,” Bennett says. “There’s an open invitation, but you’ve got to work. It’s not a gravy train. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the day. “
Bill Bennett began working in the family business in high school. “One year I worked in production. Back then we had wooden milk crates, and we hand-packed them with glass bottles. One summer I drove a truck. I can remember the days of stand-up trucks—you actually drove them standing up. You’d walk into a person’s home at four or five in the morning. The door was open; you’d walk in, look in the refrigerator, and decide what they needed. Once in a while, you’d walk into the occasional big dog that didn’t want you there. All those stories about dogs are absolutely true.”
Bennett says the company would like to expand its market, both geographically and with new products. “I think we rely perhaps too heavily on sales of fluid white milk,” he says. “We deliver all the way up in Presque Isle, because it’s important; we want to maintain brand recognition throughout the state. But if you go the same distance the other way, you’re in New York City. And that way is where the people are. But there’s more competition there, too.
“We want to be able to serve a wide customer base. Looking to the future, we want to serve everybody: schools, institutions, restaurants, convenience stores, mom and pops, medium-size independent grocery stores, big chains, box stores, service companies. We need to be able to do that, and do it well. It keeps us all jumping.”
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Always Thinking Green
Environmental innovations save money, help keep Maine farmer-friendly.
Everyone at Oakhurst is passionate about leaving the planet a better place than they found it. That’s why the dairy donates 10% of each year’s profits to large and small organizations throughout New England that promote environmental stewardship and children’s health. But the company’s commitment to the environment goes beyond that.
In 1992, Oakhurst became the first company in Maine to stop using refrigerants containing CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, which destroy ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere. From 1993 through 2000, the dairy spearheaded the Millennium Tree Challenge, which resulted in the planting of more than 1,000 trees in Portland. And the company has converted seven of its sales fleet vehicles to hybrid and its entire delivery fleet to biodiesel, using fuel made from used vegetable oil from fast-food restaurants.
On the roof of the dairy are 72 testaments to Oakhurst’s commitment to conservation: an array of solar panels, erected in 2008, that’s saving the company 10,000 gallons of oil a year. “We wash all the milk cases that we use every day before they go over to the filling area,” says President and CEO Bill Bennett. “That requires water above 160°. The solar panels heat most of the water most of the way. It took a lot of, pardon the pun, heat off our boilers.”
In 2009, Oakhurst installed a new solar photovoltaic energy system at its Waterville distribution depot. The system is made up of 216 solar panels totaling 3,250 square feet. The installation generates approximately 15% of the building’s electricity load and will reduce carbon dioxide emissions at the facility by an estimated 70,000 pounds.
Another cost-saving and fuel-saving measure, begun in 2009, is fitting delivery trailers with “skirts” that improve aerodynamics and thus conserve fuel.
And in 2010, the Oakhurst Sustainability Committee established four-year goals to reduce the company’s carbon footprint in the areas of water, overall plant energy, greenhouse gas emissions, transportation, and solid waste.
It’s all part of the philosophy of “always thinking green,” as touted on the company’s website and backed up by years of sensible business practices long before the term “sustainable” was popular.
“We recycle our paper and cardboard, but it’s difficult to recycle plastic bottles, because of the sanitation issues,” Bill Bennett says. “I can’t hold all that plastic here on-site until I have enough for someone to come take it away. We’re working on it. Every year, we talk to two or three outlets, and sooner or later we’re going to figure it out so that we can grind it up and send it to somebody.”
Company Brief: Oakhurst Dairy, Portland, Maine
Year founded: 1921
Employees: 237
Creation details: Founded by Stanley T. Bennett in 1921, Oakhurst was one of thousands of small dairies founded after 1900, as inexpensive pasteurization equipment became available. Few survive.
Products: Milk, flavored milk, cream, ice cream mix, cultured products (e.g., sour cream and cottage cheese), eggnog, juices, and drinks.
Annual revenue: $105 million.
Production (milk): 120,000 gallons daily.
Plant size: 75,000 square feet
Distribution area: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
Primary milk source: 72 Maine dairy farmers.
New projects: Installation of solar equipment; four-year sustainability effort begun in 2010 aimed at reducing the company’s overall carbon footprint.
Challenges: Fuel costs, limited space, competition from larger companies.
To learn more: www.oakhurstdairy.com
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