St. Johns Dairy Processing Campus
In 2018, Glanbia Nutritionals formed a joint venture partnership with Dairy Farmers of America and Select Milk Producers (MWC). Together, they expanded St. Johns Industrial Park property totaling 146-acres. This partnership built both a cheese plant and a whey plant totaling about 400,000 square feet.
Announced summer 2018, opened late 2020
The site broke ground in September 2018 and is quickly taking shape as home to MWC processing facilities, as well as a complimentary Proliant Diary Processing facility, together forming the St Johns Diary Processing Campus.
The MWC JV has invested $470 million into 350,000 square feet of new state-of-the-art facilities to produce a variety of cheese and whey protein products. Lead investor Glanbia is Ireland’s 5th largest company, and the world’s #1 producer of American-style cheddar cheese.
MWC’s facilities are designed to process 8 million pounds of milk every day from the onset, or nearly a quarter of all milk produced in Michigan.
Iowa-based Proliant Dairy Ingredients is constructing an adjacent $85 million 85,000 square foot facility to process liquid whey permeate, a byproduct from the MWC operation, which will be processed into various whey permeate products used in baking, confectionery, drink mixes and animal feed. Proliant’s whey permeate drying facility will be the largest of its type in the world processing approximately 400,000 pounds of dairy solids per day.
The project included unprecedented collaboration among farmers, private investors, state and regional economic developers, local governments and talent-building organizations.