Member Profile
Firmly Rooted in the Northeast, Lactalis Is Growing and “Here to Stay” BY COURTNEY KLESS
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actalis Group began as a small family cheese company in 1933. The company has grown significantly since then, adding milk, butter and yogurt to its offerings and selling its products in 94 countries around the world – including the United States. But there is one thing that hasn’t changed. “Our values of ambition and engagement with simplicity — those go back almost 100 years and are still widely talked about within the company,” said 42 • Northeast Dairy Foods Association, Inc.
Chris Bona, director of U.S. communications for Lactalis. “We’re the world’s largest dairy company, but it still feels like we’re a small company at every level.” Nearly nine decades ago, André Besnier founded the Lactalis Group in Laval, France. In the early 1980s, the company opened its first facility in the United States, an import office in New York City for European cheeses. Lactalis would continue to expand in the United States from there, acquiring Sorrento Cheese and establishing a corporate office in Buffalo, New York,
in 1992 and expanding its production of Italian cheeses with a new plant in Nampa, Idaho in 1999. There have been numerous other acquisitions since then, including Kraft Heinz’s natural cheese business, which was finalized at the end of November. Lactalis now has 11 plants in the United States. “Lactalis in the United States began in the Northeast, and this has been the market that has driven our recent external growth, mostly through the acquisition of broad-based branded products that are located here,” said Don Heins, manager of U.S. communications for
