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The Albertland Co-operative Dairy Company opened a cheese factory in Woodcocks Road, Warkworth, with great fanfare on November 8, 1968.
Celebrations were held over two days, with the factory being officially opened by NZ Dairy Board chairman Sir Andrew Linton in front of an estimated crowd of 800 invited guests.
The purchase of the two-hectare site and construction of the nearly 1600sqm (16,454sqft) factory cost $600,000.
It was run by 22 staff under a management team that included manager Graham Whitehead, first assistant J. Bell, second assistant D.K. Barratt and resident engineer G. Harkness.
It was highly mechanised with equipment that was considered revolutionary for the time. This included a prototype pressmaster which did a job in seven minutes employing three men that used to take 20 to 30 men 12 hours.
The Warkworth factory produced mild, tasty and Colby cheese, which was marketed under the brand names Dairygold and Albertland, in one to two kilo packs. It had a storage capacity of 21,000lbs, roughly the equivalent of 17 days at peak production.
A Northern Advocate article in April 1971 was confidently predicting that cheese production in Warkworth would rise from about 200 tonnes a year to 3500 tonnes – making it one of New Zealand’s top cheese factories.
In 1974, Albertland merged with the Mid-Northern Co-op Dairy Company, which had 1100 dairy farms, milking an average of 120 cows, supplying 1.75 million litres of milk to four plants.
While cheese was the main product, it is understood that the factory also started treating the whey (a byproduct of the cheese making process) and sending it to the TipTop factory in Auckland to be used to make ice cream.
Mangawhai resident Ken Chatterton worked at the plant for 14 years. He remembers when a new DMC (Draining Matting Cheddaring) stainless steel belt was installed.
“They sent half a dozen of us down to Eltham, near Hawera, to learn how to use it,” he says. “The DMC cost $230,000 and we’d only had it about 12 months when the factory closed. It was a bit of a surprise really.
“All the machinery was packed into containers and sent to Brisbane. I think the manager at the time, Graham Wolford, went over there to help set up the new plant.”
Former Northland Dairy Company chairman John Gamble says Warkworth made “very, very good cheese”, but the business climate of the time was against it.
“Our factories produced whole milk powder, skim milk powder, casein and cheese,” he says. “Whole milk powder was worth far more than cheese, so naturally that’s where the milk went. In the end, there just wasn’t enough milk to keep the Warkworth factory viable.”
The company’s annual report for the year ended May 31, 1988 noted:
“The decision was made during the year to permanently close the Warkworth cheese plant which has been non-operational for the last two years.”
The factory, along with two brick houses, was sold to the Rodney Times.
Sources: Interviews, Warkworth Museum, Massey University archives
