Learning-Eat & Dairy of Now deploy modern techniques to continue growth

Local Learning Food producers of vegetables, fruit, dairy, grain, fish and meat work together with Rendiz and people with a distance to the labor market to make elementary school students happy with fresh and healthy food. A beautiful initiative that arose from passion and the conviction that things can be done differently. But how can you do it differently? Local dairy producer Zuivel van Nu and Lerend-Eten (a link between the two) can tell us all about it.

This is part 3 of the story of Learning-Eating & Zuivel van Nu. First read part 1 & part 2.

Marianne's role within Learning to Eat is mainly to connect the right parties, do a bit of networking and support. According to her, stories like this are the magnet. 'We asked ourselves the question how to make inclusivity easier. Because it's not easy to set up guidance for people with a distance to the labor market. With Rendiz that works very nicely. They help us to provide healthy lunches and have these things well organized. Lerend-Eten wants to strengthen these connections by continuing to share the story. Just by being ourselves. Keep moving, trusting and feeling from that deep why.'

For Mark and Ineke, it all started in their own kitchen. The great demand for fresh dairy from farm visitors was one of the reasons to start with dairy processing. We were only too happy to introduce these people to our own dairy. Without any knowledge of how to process dairy, we started experimenting. We wanted to figure out the dials ourselves. That may be a bit stubborn, but it also shows the entrepreneurship that is involved. That's how Zuivel van Nu grew from a 20 liter pan to several pasteurizers with a total capacity of 1100 liters.'

The dairy production is now growing so fast that the dairy space has actually become too small. 'We used to milk our cows by hand, nowadays we fill our dairy products by hand. The milking of our cows is now fully automatic thanks to the milking robots. This beautiful technology gives the cows the space to go wherever they want. They can choose day and night when to be milked, go outside, drink, eat, lie down and you name it. Keeping cows that have so much freedom makes the work even more beautiful.'

Mark and Ineke now have the ambition to also use the modern techniques available in dairy processing to process their own dairy. We are ready for the next step, because we now know what it is like to process and market milk ourselves. However, in terms of labor intensity and efficiency there is still a long way to go. We will be working intensively on this in the coming year.'