McColls is a famous name in Australian dairy and the largest independent transporter of milk, moving 2.3 billion litres around the country.
Founded in 1952 by Stuart McColl, the business has grown from one truck picking up milk from a handful of farms to a fleet of 700 tankers and 23 depots, collecting milk from farms all over Australia and delivering it to processing facilities.
McColls is also a leader in food safety standards and technology improvements for milk transporting.
“We’ve brought innovations such as automated sampling to tankers, to improve food safety outcomes,” said CEO Simon Thornton, who is part owner of the McColls Group through the Friesian Group.
“We introduced computerised tankers and when they arrive at a farm, the tanker knows automatically whose farm it is, what time it is, how many litres of milk were collected and at what temperature.”
Additionally, each farm is allocated two sample bottles, which are automatically filled by peristaltic sampling. Those samples are barcoded and sent to independent laboratories to test for bacteria and antibiotics.
“In terms of food safety, our big focus is to ensure we don’t allow anything bad into the milk supply chain. And to do that, we do rigorous sampling at the farm before the milk leaves,” Simon said.
“The tankers also check for fat and protein content, because that’s important for quality and the calculation for milk payments.
“We monitor the milk temperature all the way to the factory and then we do more testing at the factory. Each processor has different rules about what kind of sampling needs to happen before the milk goes into the big silo, so we do SNAP and Delvotests, which are used for the detection of antibiotic residues in milk. There’s a lot of science and data that comes into it now.”
Simon said the adoption of technology on farms was also improving food safety knowledge and industry standards.
“Many modern farmers have cutting edge data on a cow by cow, day by day basis to compare cow health, what the cow is consuming, the quality of milk coming out and what the quality of the milk is. And robots on farms are giving the industry even more data about cow health and milk production,” he said.
“One issue that farmers and transporters need to be aware of is that the cooling curve is slightly different with robots. In a traditional dairy where you have milking occurring at set times, it’s a fixed cooling curve. That’s very different with a robotic farm where there’s constant milk coming in, so you’ve got to keep a very close eye on what’s going on with the cooling curve.
“But I do think robotic dairies are the future because it’s very hard to convince the next generation to sign up to a pretty demanding lifestyle of twice-a-day milking, 365 days a year. Robots allow farmers to run their dairies in a much more sustainable way.”
Since the Friesian Group acquired McColls in 2018, the group has invested in more productive equipment and setting up their own productive sites for tanker washes.
“There was a time where milk was collected in churns and then it went to single axle semi-trailers, which were about 10 metres long and now we’re up to 30-metre combinations with up to 12 axles. So now we can move about 50,000 litres in most combinations,” Simon said.
“We’ve made a big investment in 39 of these fasting pumping tankers in various parts of the country. They’re very important in South Australia because often milk travels a long way here.”
A second focus area for McColls is developing productive sites, which are set up with infrastructure for Clean in Place (CIP) washes, to reduce reliance on dairy processors for tanker washdowns.
“Often the dairy processors have aged factories and are processing at levels far beyond the volumes the factories were originally designed for. Washing tankers at those sites is disruptive for them.
“We might spend half an hour delivering the milk and then another hour in the bay at the factory washing the tanker out. If we can take the cleaning to our own facility and track all the hygiene data, it benefits the processors and it allows us greater control over the hygiene quality.
“We’re bringing more science to our hygiene program by investing in productive sites. We’ve moved into seven sites in the past 18 months and have started developing them, including one in Mount Gambier.”
Simon would also like to see changes to the dairy supply chain, to improve the industry’s environmental scorecard and efficiency.
“Milk is travelling much further than it needs to in many cases in Australia. We used to send out one tanker to collect milk from the farmers in a region, but now we’re sending four or five tankers to the region as each farm is supplying a different factory, some of which might be 500 kilometres away,” Simon said.
“That adds an enormous amount of cost and inefficiency. Transport companies don’t make more money by taking the milk further, it mainly benefits fuel suppliers.
“As an industry, if we want to improve our sustainability and reduce our carbon footprint, the biggest thing we could all do is make sure milk goes to the nearest factory.”