This Bangor dairy company made more than 1 million pounds of cheese last year
A dairy company tucked behind the Bangor International Airport has quietly become the largest cheese producer in Maine after arriving in the city roughly five years ago.
The Pineland Farms Dairy Company made more than a million pounds of cheese — using 10 million pounds of milk — in its 70,000-square-foot facility on Milk Street in Bangor last year, and it plans to make 1.3 million pounds in 2023.
While Penobscot produces more milk than any other county in Maine, the loss of a major dairy company in 2013 forced local farmers to sell what they produced to plants in Portland, including Hood and Oakhurst. This also saddled farmers with the added cost of transportation, and the travel takes time out of the milk’s already short shelf life.
Pineland Farms Dairy Company sells more than a dozen varieties of cheeses and curds to stores throughout New England, Jan. 18, 2023. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / B
The Libra Foundation, a Portland-based nonprofit that owns Pineland Farms, bought and outfitted the Bangor facility with the intention of reigniting the local milk market, said Craig Denekas, Libra Foundation chairman and CEO.
“The idea was ‘What are we going to do with dairy in Bangor in the next generation?’” Denekas said. “What’s going to happen to those farms and land if there’s no longer a market in Bangor? What the farmers really want to stay in business is to have a market for the product.”
Pineland Farms’ Bangor facility previously housed Grant’s Dairy before it was bought by Garelick Dairy in 1994. Garelick went bankrupt in early 2013. Every piece of equipment in the facility was sold, and the building sat vacant and fell into disrepair until 2017 when the Libra Foundation bought it.
The Libra Foundation invested tens of millions of dollars into refurbishing the facility, which required buying all new equipment for every step of the cheese-making process, Denekas said.
“It was a dead building,”…
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