The Big Cheese Plant Is Off and Running : First Cheddar Rolls Off Assembly Line and Is Pronounced ‘Great’

Employees of the world’s largest cheese-manufacturing plant got the first taste of their product Tuesday afternoon as the Golden California Cheese Co. produced a test batch of 10,000 pounds of cheddar.

Two stainless steel trucks had delivered 110,000 pounds of milk to the $120-million plant early Tuesday morning, and by mid-afternoon spongy yellow curds were rolling along conveyor belts into machines that would salt them and form them into blocks.

But after five years of planning and construction, plant officials were not about to wait to begin testing the cheese, both in the laboratory and on the palate.

“It’s great,” pronounced David C. Wooten, president of Integrated Protein Technology, parent company of Golden California Cheese. “. . . (And) this is a great milestone for everybody here.”

Cheese production at the plant is slated to grow gradually, until it reaches its capacity of 230,000 pounds daily in May, 1986, Wooten said. “We will have days when we’ll shut down for maintenance . . . to fix the leaks and clean the equipment, but production will be essentially continuous now through May.”

Besides producing Cheddar, colby and Monterey Jack cheese for sale in California, the plant will use nearly all the byproducts of the cheese-making process, according to Henry Roberts, president of Express Foods, the company that is operating the plant.

Whey “is usually a waste product that would be thrown away, or that you would pay someone to take away,” said Jonathan DuBois, a director of Integrated Protein Technology.

But automated machinery in the 180,000-square-foot plant will remove fat from whey to churn 3 million pounds of butter annually. Other machines will filter out whey protein to manufacture 5 million pounds of protein concentrate annually for use in pharmaceutical and food products.

And a distillery will convert lactose into 2 million gallons of alcohol each year--for use as fuel or for human consumption, Roberts said.

Milk is 87% water, and even the leftover water will be recycled for use in various parts of the plant. “Obviously, water is very expensive in California,” Roberts said. “Recycling not only saves water, but also reduces effluent,” the plant’s output of wastewater.

Golden California Cheese employs 60 people, a number that will increase by about 100 before the plant reaches its capacity. It will then consume about 2.3-million pounds of milk each day--about 6% of California’s statewide milk production.