How Emmi has made a cheese factory of the future

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Four years ago, Emmi realised its cheese plant in the Swiss village of Emmen was extremely out of date. Simply refitting the place was not an option because it wouldn’t allow for future expansion. And new machinery would have to run immediately with not guarantee of efficacy.

So, a more radical solution was put in place. Now, after a CHF50m (£47m) investment, a brand-new cheese factory is now fully operational and one of the most advanced in the world.

Raising a new building next to the original meant equipment could all be checked thoroughly before beginning production, as well as enabling team members to be trained on the new machines.

The new site is the result of “capacity, quality and growth plans”, says its MD, Ann-Kathrin Kleinthomä. It has 80% more capacity than the old one, and can process 100 million litres of milk and produce 10 million kilos of cheese per year.

It will help drive Emmi’s growth throught the production of more premium goods, Kleinthomä adds. “We produce a lot at the moment, but what we can do now is to push more the brands with a good margin and then lower the amount of more generic cheeses we have.”

When the site opened at the end of 2022, Marc Heim, Emmi executive VP for Switzerland, said the business was “sending out a message that we want to strengthen our leading market position in our home market”. It is definitely a significant investment in Switzerland – but the opportunities go beyond just one nation.

Emmi’s branded cheese exports are “growing every year”, Kleinthomä says. The business is keen to continue this expansion from its home in the canton of Lucerne. As such, it secured three extra listings earlier this month for its Kaltbach cheeses in the UK, via Marks & Spencer.

It has taken a long time to get this point and is continuing to expand. The latest change has been the introduction of two robots that do the palletising. The commissioning of those machines was finalised last year, after as the old brine room, where they are now located, had been rennovated.

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The upgraded production site also offers sustainability benefits, promising to save up to 70 million litres of water per year by operating in an almost water-neutral manner. The site reuses the water from whey processing, filtering it so it can then be reused for cleaning. ”I think we are the only ones in Switzerland that do it like this,” says Kleinthomä.

It also sports solar panels on the roof, and makes use of steam from a neighbouring factory that produces wood chips, which “is a really sustainable way of producing steam and is used for the whole production site”, says Kleinthomä.

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The biggest change at the site has been the creation of a “continuous process”, which is highly optimised. It is “completely different and the automation has changed a lot”, she adds. New technology has taken over previously manual jobs. This has the added benefit of improving the working conditions of employees, Kleinthomä insists.

“The [workers] were afraid at the beginning to press the wrong button, and this we had to train and get rid of these fears.” But once sorted, the system has made jobs broader and reduced the amount of hands-on tasks, without the loss of any jobs in the business.

The new cheese dairy building also brings progress in terms of occupational safety. It offers ergonomic workstations with optimal lighting conditions that meet the highest quality and safety management standards, Emmi insists. This has enabled the business to keep employees in the company for longer periods, with many choosing to stay for their entire careers.

“Cheesemaking has a big tradition in our region and in Switzerland and it’s good for us that we could keep the employees in this region,” she adds. “They are really, really proud.”