Coronavirus : Dairy industry continuity plan

GLANBIA Ireland has a series of strong measures in place as part of a robust business continuity process across our supply chain and processing facilities.

Our Business Continuity Planning (BCP) process was activated in February in order to deal with the challenges arising from Coronavirus (Covid-19).

A series of stringent control measures are in place across all of our key processing sites including all non-essential operational staff moved off site; site visits strictly limited only to business-critical third parties; social distancing and operational protocols.

All Glanbia Ireland facilities continue to operate to their planned capacity levels for this time of year.

Glanbia Ireland would like to express our deep thanks to our workforce, our farmers and our hauliers, and their families, who have all given enormous commitment to keep our supply chain and all our facilities running.

Dairy Industry Ireland (DII), the representative body for the country’s dairy processors, including Glanbia Ireland, continue to meet regularly to assess contingency plans in place across the Irish milk processing sector.

DII has estimated that spare Irish processing capacity could be as low as 1% to 2% during the seasonal peak in supply volume in May, with peak supply expected to reach as high as 250 million litres per week.

With Irish milk supply volumes increasing towards peak, the industry is collaborating with all stakeholders to make every possible effort to ensure that all milk produced on farms can continue to be processed.

However, with reference to Health Service Executive (HSE) modelling of a likely increase in Covid-19 cases and the resulting consequent workforce absentee rates in all businesses, the industry scenarios now include a material disruption to throughput at key processing locations.

DII has stated that significant EU and Irish Government support measures will be required to address this in a manner that will protect milk suppliers and processors. In addition, it may potentially require all dairy farmers to implement some milk supply restraint at peak.

At a global level there are also considerable challenges in the supply chain due to the massive disruption to international trade.

First Published 27 March 2020