By Dylana Milobar

Blackwell Dairy products making their return

Feb 27, 2019 | 4:08 PM

KAMLOOPS — A familiar dairy presence will once again stock the shelves in Kamloops grocery stores.

After a fire destroyed Blackwell Dairy operations June 14, 2017, the farm has rebuilt their processing plant, and will be distributing milk as early as Friday.

Owner Ted Blackwell says they are elated to finally get back up and running. 

“On June 15 I started thinking of nothing but the rebuild, and basically I’ve dedicated 24/7 to this plant.”

“So we’re in a real happy mood today because yesterday we got our Class 1 processing license, ” he explains. “Protection for the general public in a processing plant is not an easy thing to accomplish, especially when you’re dealing with food. And so we’re extremely happy. It’s a beautiful plant, it’s state of the art, it’ll compete with any plant in North America.”

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As far as capacity, the plant can process 5,000 litres an hour.

“So we can put a lot of milk through this plant,” Blackwell says, “The savings will be in the efficiency that we designed the plant to.”

“It might be short a couple of things in a couple of jugs, but we’ll have a full range of product. Right from skim, 1%, 2%, homo milk, chocolate milk, our table cream, whipping cream,” he explains. “Our products that we might miss would be one particular size of jug, and cultured products such as buttermilk and whatnot.”

Blackwell says orders have already started coming in, with grocery stores in the area and loyal customers waiting for the dairy’s rebuild to be completed.

“As soon as we opened yesterday, 30 seconds later we had customers coming through the door,” he explains, “which isn’t our forte. We’re wholesale but we did make a store front, and customers love it. We had customers coming from everywhere in Kamloops just to get our product, they’ve been waiting for it.”

Among the big commerical customers are schools within School District 73 for milk programs, which Blackwell says they enjoy doing.

“It was our big forte. We did a lot of advertising through the schools. The children are our best customers because they tell their parents what to buy,” he laughs. “So that’ll be going back on stream. How much right away, not sure.”

The first milk products will be hitting grocery stores Friday, with another round of deliveries scheduled next week on Tuesday. 

“We’re going to look after Kamloops first, and then we’ll move outwards,” Blackwell explains. “We go as far (east) as the border, we go up north up to Williams Lake, all the way to Revelstoke, Kelowna, Vernon, Armstrong, Salmon Arm. We have really good customers all the way through.”

Along with those wholesale deliveries, the farm’s on-site store will be open from 8:00 a.m to 4:00 p.m daily.