Arla Foods

They also share information with each other about business practice and innovation.

Arla Foods is the biggest producer of dairy products in the UK and Europe's largest dairy cooperative.

Its 9,000 multinational farmer owners not only share in the profits, but play an active role in deciding how the business is run.

Helen Millican's been finding out how this works in practice on a Cumbrian dairy farm in the Eden Valley.

Having people like James locally, people that you know personally so you can actually ring them and say, "Look, there's a problem here," or, "How about doing this?" It's a really good system.

We like to be fully involved in what's going on.

Paul Dover is UK agricultural director for Arla Foods.

Paul, part of your role is to engage with your farmer members.

Ireland, one of the most successful, if not the most successful, cross-border co-op.

Where often neighbouring co-ops can't sit in the same room, Ireland have taken co-operation to the next level.

In 25 years, which might sound like a long time, but in generational co-operation across countries, it's absolutely not.

Hi folks, I'm Jack Kennedy and welcome to The Milk Business, a podcast on global dairy insights and analysis on issues that should be of interest to milk suppliers, co-ops and companies trading in the global dairy game.

Arla last week announced excellent half year results.

So this week, because I was inundated with queries about Arla, we've decided to do something different and just to stand back to admire and just understand a bit more about how Arla operates.

We all saw the numbers last week.

Arla have improved and have approved a half year supplementary payment to members of one cent per kilo of Arla.

The report was commissioned by The Dairy Roadmap, an industry-wide initiative to improve the environmental footprint of the whole dairy supply chain by twenty thirty.

Bas Padberg is chair of The Dairy Roadmap and also managing director of the dairy cooperative Arla.

I think, first of all, farmers have been on a great journey for many years already, and what the report is showing is that we, we can scale faster with the things that work, things on herd management and nutritional efficiency, so really scaling that up faster.

And these are, let's say, solutions that have proven to work.

Well, Haley, it's two massive shifts unfolding, consolidation and specialization.

The Arla-DMK merger created Europe's largest dairy cooperative.

Lactellus keeps acquiring, adding Fonterra's mainland dairy business and General Mills yogurt brands.

But we're overseeing companies trade diversification for focus.

ways now.

They are trumped or pipped to the post by Arla Foods, which are not British.

Yes.

And Muller.

I'm going to go away from Conor Gammon's comments here because he will not want to be associated with what I'm going to say.

next but I'll say it anyway like I have long argued in favour of having a Fonterra type model for Irish agriculture if you look at like we will have this we'll talk about later on about the global whey market global whey protein that is based on results from Arla which is the big Danish co-op big Danish Swedish German co-op and their turnover is about the same as the entire Irish dairy industry.

So our Irish dairy industry is made up of eight or nine co-ops.

We don't need eight or nine co-ops doing all these different things and competing with each other.

It's got an annual turnover exceeding $67 billion, or $40 billion in US dollar terms.

Switzerland's Nestlé came in second, followed by Dairy Farmers of America, Denmark's Arla Foods, and Danone also of France.

We were speaking to Mark's story about this, and he says that the industry has been buffeted by changes to input prices like fertiliser, obviously just as a result of the conflict in the Middle East.

And he expects that volatility to continue, but he says that the demand for dairy has held up well and will continue to do so.