Burra Foods was a concept born in the early 80s, the idea was to move out of liquid milk, which was government controlled, into what we call manufacturing milk, which is more open, internationally marketed, with less price regulation.
At the time the Crothers family had a medium sized liquid milk business in Shepparton that processed 35 million litres and employed 100 people. In 1987 we bought a little yoghurt factory in Bayswater called Gippsland Dairy Products, it was a small operation, five staff, three of those part time, two full time, which made yoghurt and cottage cheese, and the idea was to transfer this business, to Shepparton, where we had manufacturing skills, and grow it.
Two years later, we still hadn’t moved it out of Bayswater, and my brother William and I were running the liquid milk business. In 1989 we got the proverbial knock on the door from the competitor, “How about selling your business?”, interest rates were 18%, so we were paying huge money to the bank, and we thought “Oh, maybe that’s a good idea that we sell this liquid milk business that had been in the family for 45 years”.
We’d grown significantly in the previous five or six years, due to some plant expansion my father had undertaken in the early 80s, so we sold the business called Midland Milk to Bonlac Foods.
While I was working full time at King Island Dairy, William came across a rambling, empty old factory called, Korumburra Butter Factory, in Station Street, Korumburra, and we bought that in 1990.
By mid 1991, we were in there, and it was effectively the five or six people from Bayswater in this big, rambling old factory. We’d already made some expansionary moves into a new product line, fromage frais dairy dessert but we didn’t have any facilities, we just had a dream and a little bit of technology and a bit of marketing, but finally moving to Korumburra we had this potentially wonderful, infrastructure that was very run down, needed lots of money spent on it, but could be done slowly, and slowly, slowly, slowly upgraded. That was really the birth of Burra Foods.
Grant Crothers
Co-owner and CEO.
Picture right: Founders Grant & William Crothers