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farmingscotland
DAIRY
Issue seventy-two • December 2010
Mackies Making Snacks
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commitment to cutting edge agricultural technology is helping a world famous brand maintain its place as a market leader. Mackies of Scotland – based at Westertown, Rothienorman, Aberdeenshire and famous for affordable luxury dairy ice cream – has recently installed a new Lely robot. No stranger to the brand, the Mackie family already has nine milking robots installed in their extensive facility, which milks over 500 Jersey and Holstein cows and is the largest voluntary access milking facility in Europe. The latest addition is a feed robot which drives up and down the pass, pushing feed closer to the cows. In the case of the Mackies’ cows, this happens every two hours with the robot passing through the feeding area independently before returning to its docking station to recharge. Mackies of Scotland managing director Mac Mackie (Maitland junior) explained: “We have had the latest Lely robot for about a year. It is fully automatic and doesn't take up anyone's time and, in addition, it seems to have contributed positively to slightly higher yields so we are very pleased.” And the Lely feeding system is not the only new robot to arrive at
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Westertown in recent months – a £900.000 investment has brought a new system for making packing to Mackies. Mac Mackie explained: “Most of our packaging was being bought in from Sweden so there was a big transport and environmental cost attached to that. “We worked out that it would be better for us to make packaging on-site at Westertown so we have invested in a bespoke injection moulding machine from Switzerland, which creates two of our best-selling one litre tubs every six seconds, or 25,000 a day. “All ice cream manufacturers buy their packaging so it has been an unusual move and a bit of a gamble but it is definitely paying off. There have also been lots of new skills to learn because injection moulding is an industry on its own but, after weeks of training, the operators are doing really well and the system is now working 24 hours a day, five days a week. “This year we have also expanded our cold store to add 250 pallets of additional storage and that now means we can store more of the finished ice cream product at Westertown before it moves on to our distributors.”
Mac went on: “These latest investments very much enhance and underline the 'turf to tub' ethos, which we are very proud of.” Mackies ice cream will celebrate 25 years on the market next year, but the family moved to Westertown in the 1920s when Mac's great grandfather set each of his six children up with a farm. Mac's grandfather moved to Westertown and soon began the dairying and milk retailing enterprise, which would later make Mackies a household name. Following the acquisition of a neighbouring farm ten years ago, Westertown now extends to 1,600 acres, half of which is used for the dairy enterprise in the form of grazing, silage and growing propcorn grain for the cattle. As well as 100 acres of 20 to 25-year-old trees, there are about 800 acres of wheat, barley and oilseed rape and maize could be set to join the list as a trial crop next year. During the summer, the Mackie family decided to throw the doors open for a day and welcomed 7,000 visitors to the farm, raising £45,000 for a muscular dystrophy charity in the process. The event was spearheaded by Mackies' sales director Dennis Emslie, who suffers from the disease.
Maitland Mackie senior built up the established family business and started the ice cream enterprise in 1986, as Mac explained: “Basically it was to get rid of surplus cream, which was a problem to deal with at that time because people were increasingly moving to semi skimmed milk. “Also, there were very few proper, dairy ice creams on the market and most were vegetable fat products so there was a natural gap in the market for us. “At the beginning, we had one man making the ice cream with equipment in the corner of the dairy in the morning and taking it out in a van to sell in the afternoon. Now, Mackies of Scotland as a whole employs 75 people. The ice cream business produced eight million litres last year and turned over £11 million for the year to May 21st, 2010.” And whilst UK sales remain crucial to Mackies, the export market is also thriving and key markets include Ireland, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. The latest addition to the extensive ice cream range is Extra Posh to give slightly stronger flavours including Belgian chocolate, Toffee and Madagascan vanilla. Launched just this year, the products have been well received and are proving to be very