Dairy Foods has nominated 13 dairy processing plants that manufacture fluid milk, cheese, ice cream or cultured dairy products. All have been featured on dairyfoods.com over the previous 17 months.
May 16, 2018
Which plant will be Dairy Foods’ 2018 Dairy Plant of the Year? Will it be a small fluid milk processing facility in Phoenix or a large cheesemaker in Wisconsin? Those are just two of the 13 dairy plants that are in the running for Dairy Foods’ Plant of the Year.
Praline’s Inc. crafts its award-winning ice cream using high-quality ingredients — many of them made from scratch — and an impressive hand-mixing technique
You won't find any fancy feeder hoppers or blenders in Praline's Inc.'s Wallingford, Conn., ice cream processing, distribution and headquarters facility. The company believes that the old-fashioned methods still yield the best-tasting ice cream. So plant employees start with a high-quality base, then mix in the variegates and inclusions by hand.
Bees are critical to one-third of the world's crops, including ingredients that are used in more than one-third of Haagen-Dazs ice cream flavors. However, their numbers continue to dwindle, an estimated one-third of honey bee colonies were lost between April 2016 and March 2017, Haagen-Dazs said.
Compared to many other ice cream processors, Wallingford, Conn.-based Praline’s Inc. runs a rather small operation. The 34-year-old company got its start with a single Praline’s ice cream store in Wallingford; it later sold that shop through a franchise agreement to exit retail and enter the ice cream-making business full time.