Life in a cream world

Andrew Rodda, operations director, Rodda's Creamery​

The perfect weather for selling clotted cream is said to be sunny, but not too hot. Ideally, you want it to become overcast mid-afternoon so people will go into a café for a cream tea!

The Roddas have been making clotted cream here since the 1890s, so I've grown up with it, although I was never put under pressure to work here. I remember filling pots for my father at the creamery when I was pretty young but I didn't go straight into the business. I did an HND and a degree in electronic design and then spent a couple of years at sea with the seismic survey before coming back here.

Having an engineering background enables you to maintain and source equipment yourself, which gives you far more control. We've developed most of our systems in-house - including the new factory, which I designed, commissioned and project managed.

We have been farming in Scorrier since about 1880 and kept dairy cattle, beef cattle and sheep. We still have a very close relationship with the local farms, which supply around 250,000 litres of milk a day. Cornish milk is also a condition of the Protected Designation of Origin status for which Cornish Clotted Cream gained the accolade in 1998.

There is a fairly plentiful supply of milk locally but, to ensure quality and security, we set up the Rodda's producer group with Milk Link about three years ago. This has 103 farms in it that are allocated to us; the farmers get paid a bonus to supply the group's milk, which is then ring-fenced for our use. At peak times we can draw milk from outside our producer group. The quality of the milk is extremely good because the warm climate in west Cornwall produces a higher butterfat yield, which makes for good quality cream. The legal minimum butterfat for clotted cream is 55% fat, whereas ours is over 60%.

The raw milk arrives on tankers direct from the farm and is tested for antibiotics before being pumped into the silos where it's held and agitated to make sure it's evenly mixed. It then goes into a balance tank, a heat exchanger and is then separated at 40-50°C for the most efficient separation of cream solids. The cream comes off at 55-60% butterfat, depending on the unit size to be manufactured and then the skimmed milk is heated up to 72°C to be pasteurised and then chilled and despatched.

We produce the full range of creams, butter and crème fraiche here, but clotted cream is the core of the business. To make it, we fill the cream into pots and trays and then cook it for a couple of hours - I can't be more specific than that because it's a trade secret! Cooking changes the structure of the fat molecules so when it cools down and crystallises it forms a more solid structure, with its nice golden crust.

The increasing challenge is ensuring we balance the volume and get a good price for our skimmed milk. The difference between the price we pay for the raw milk and what we sell the skim for determines the price of the cream. At the moment, skimmed milk prices are very weak, which is making things difficult. We're looking at whether we can achieve a better value by fractionating the skimmed milk into different products - perhaps for the times when we have surplus, rather than sending it for drying into skimmed milk powder, which is at the lower end of the market.

Our peak production period begins in May and continues until September, tracking the soft fruit and tourist season, but we also have a very big month in December. The milk field follows to a certain extent - you get a flush in production in the spring, but then it falls off again in the autumn. The challenge comes at the Christmas peak, when we have to source extra milk from beyond our producer group.

Expansion​

We started looking seriously at future plans for the site in 2000 and managed to be awarded Objective One funding from the EU towards a £7M expansion project - we had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it, but it was worth it. Most of the money was spent on building a new production area. We also built a new despatch warehouse and bought a new separator, which has enabled us to increase our capacity. The new separator has got a cleaning-in-place system, which enables continuous running, whereas the old ones had to be shut down and manually de-sludged.

More recently we bought a multi-purpose filler and a new lidding machine.

Our two main filling lines can fill the range of retail and foodservice packaging from 28g to 227g pots. We've got a smaller more versatile line to fill different types of container. We also do 1lb and 2lb pots and steel pans of cream. We manually scoop out product from the pans into trays for delis or 10kg boxes or pump it into 1t containers for manufacturing customers.

We base production around an 8-12h day and we try not to work weekends, although we do a half-day packing shift on Saturdays. We have an annualised hours system on production based on a 40h week average, although packaging staff are paid by the hour.

2008 was a year of change as three of our directors retired, my brother Nick moved into the md's role and I moved from projects into the operations director role. We also took on a new factory manager - Chris Quelch.

Efficiency drive​

Things have become more challenging this year but, as we still have a relatively low ticket price product and a luxury treat, we are probably performing better than other premium products. Our diverse customer base (retail, manufacturing and catering) helps - if fewer people eat out, we might pick up more business from supermarkets, for example.

Nevertheless, sales have levelled off in the last year, whereas there was a point when we were growing 20% year-on-year, so we've been working hard to increase efficiency.

One project involves working with farmers to install an anaerobic digestion unit to create gas to fire ovens and boilers and generate electricity. This will be fed with sludge from our effluent treatment plant and slurry from our suppliers' farms.

We've re-written our bespoke production planning system so that we can come up with more accurate forecasts and use it to see where things are going wrong. We're trying to capture more data directly from the shopfloor to make us more responsive.

But there is only so much you can do to take cost out. Take packaging. As we cook the cream in its packaging, you can only lighten the weight of the containers so much before they are not fit for purpose.

Everyone is trying to keep costs down and there is a lot of pressure to fund promotions or reduce invoice prices, and you have to make a decision as to whether you can afford to say no and sometimes we do.

That said, we're luckier than most because we've got a unique product and a strong brand.

Rodda's is a family business, and I'm very proud of it, but we're not sentimental. You can't be. There are no immediate plans to sell, but I can't say we'd never do it. If someone approached us with a serious offer for the business, we'd have to consider it.

I love working here because every day is so different. But living next to the production site has its ups and downs. I get the calls at two o'clock in the morning because an alarm is going off but I also have a pretty short commute!

INTERVIEW BY Elaine Watson​

FACTORY FACTS​

Location: A E Rodda & Son, The Creamery, Scorrier, Redruth, Cornwall TR16 5BU. Tel: 01209 823300

Products: Clotted cream, crème fraiche, butter, single, double and whipping cream. Rodda's clotted cream is used to produce Rodda's branded fudge and shortbread

Employees: 120

Customers: All the major supermarkets, manufacturing, catering, airlines, export

Output: "On our busiest day we produced 54,000lbs of cream. The quietest day was 18,000lbs. We process 50-60Ml of milk a year but we could double this throughput if we moved to two shifts."

PERSONAL​

Name: Andrew Rodda

Age: 37

Career highlights: "Probably overseeing the factory expansion project from start to finish - designing the new factory and then running it."

Domestic: Married with two daughters aged six and eight

Outside work: "I motocross and endurance race on quad bikes and water ski with the kids in the summer. I am also a keen snow skier and try to go twice a year."