Pump up the volume
Looby Armstrong, production manager, Ilchester Cheese Company
Christmas at Ilchester starts in August. Earlier in fact. Every man and his dog eats cheese at Christmas, particularly blended cheese, where we are market leader. Volumes treble, and so do my stress levels. I usually get a good night's sleep, but at Christmas, I might as well just set up a camp bed in the office and be done with it!
Right now, I have four [out of 14] lines working 8am-4pm and the others do 6am-2pm and 2pm to 10pm, Monday to Friday. But at Christmas, we do 20 hour days, from 6am to 4pm and then up until 2am, seven days a week. It's crazy in here; you can barely move in the warehouse and your mind just never stops, because the timing and planning has to be spot on to manage things going from site one - our production site, to site two [next door] - our secondary packaging site.
At the moment we do some secondary packaging at site one, but we're in the process of transferring it all to site two to free up space. Secondary packaging means anything from creating a gift pack to putting little bunny-rabbit- or teddy-shaped cheeses into netting for children, and it's a huge growth area.
The peak of our season runs all the way through November and two thirds of December. We can't flatten out production over the year to smoothe that, because we're making to order on lines with a shelf-life of just seven days for some products, going up to 16 weeks for a waxed 3kg wheel. Basically, you just have to ramp things up when demand goes up.
Most supermarkets also want 75% of a product's shelf-life now, which has to be managed in a cost effective way. It might be more convenient for us, for example, to produce larger quantities and deliver less frequently, but you can't do that if they want 75%. However, with careful planning, it is possible to meet customer requirements without introducing major inefficiencies at our end. For example, it's little things like if you are making a cheddar product, you can follow it with another cheddar-based variety, so you don't have to wash everything down in the changeover.
From a recruitment point of view, being such a seasonal operation means we have to have a lot of short term contracts to meet demand. Usually, we have about 60 production people here. At Christmas, that can rise to 210.
In the past, we have tended to use backpackers - we get people coming back every year. We also use agencies. We've got Polish, Portuguese, South African and other overseas nationals working here, but we haven't had the communication problems that some companies have had because you have to be able to speak and write English to work here.
Non native speakers have to sit an English test, which is essential because there is a fair amount of paperwork: QA (quality assurance) sheets and so on for the technical department, and you have to understand recipes. However, we also provide ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) courses to help people improve their English once they are here.
SAY CHEESE
Orders are processed through the sales office and go via a spreadsheet to the planning department, which allocates them to our production lines so that everything is produced in the most efficient order.
Once a production plan is drawn up, the bulk cheese is taken out of the cold store ready to hit the block feeders. Stilton tends to come in vac-packed 6-8kg blocks and Cheddar, Red Leicester and Double Gloucester in 20kg blocks. We don't store it for long. Usually it's in and out in a day or so; definitely within the week.
First it's cut into smaller blocks. Next, it's fed into a bowl chopper and blended with other ingredients like chives, cranberries or chilli peppers according to the recipe. Two ladies pre-weigh all of our ingredients ready for the orders. Then the mix goes into a hopper and a vacuum sucks out the air. The pressure effectively forces or extrudes the blended cheese into moulds in all different shapes and sizes from 20g chuckles to 4kg wheels.
Once it's been extruded it's then sliced off and dropped onto a conveyor. After that it's bagged and packed or waxed first and then packed, metal detected, labelled, weighed and then palletised and put in the cold store ready for despatch.
The most labour intensive part of the operation is the Five Counties cheese - the one with all the different layers. That's produced in a separate area and sliced and assembled by hand. However, we have introduced two new cutters that trim the cheeses for us, which has also reduced wastage.
Our best seller is Applewood, which has a smoky flavour and is hand-rolled in paprika. Mexicana, a blend of mature Cheddar, bell, jalapeno and chilli peppers, is also very popular, along with Abbeydale, which is a Double Gloucester blended with chopped onions and chives. But we're developing new recipes all the time - we've just spent £30,000 on a new product development centre and taken on a new new product development team, so there is likely to be a lot more activity in this area!
There aren't any obvious danger points in the process as such - although you have to keep the temperature below a certain level throughout. There is always an element of risk if something snaps, such as the blades we use in the bowl choppers for example, but the metal detectors would pick that up before any cheese left the factory.
HANDS ON
When I left school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I started off working in a supermarket, then went on to work as an invoice clerk and then as a video display unit operator at a catalogue company, but I kept getting bored. So I joined NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) and got married. In 1979, I joined Ilchester Cheese, thinking that this would be just until I found a job I was really looking for, and I'm still here!
When I started, there were something like seven people working here, but as the company grew, I grew along with it, progressing up from the shop floor. You name a job here, and I've done it, which helps. Everyone here knows that I'll come out and roll up my sleeves and do any job, including sweeping the floor, and I expect my staff to do the same.
Everyone is on first name terms here, directors and shop floor staff. There is no 'them and us' mentality.
As new production lines have come on to meet demand, the pressure has grown, but it's been quite exciting since the management buyout in December 2004 [led by directors Melvin Glyn, Linda Retter and Gary Childs and backed by venture capital firm Inflexion].
In the last few months, for example, we have all sat down and looked at every aspect of the business to see how we can drive efficiency, whether it's through reducing waste, increasing automation, looking at our cleaning materials and changeover times or even considering moving to annualised hours. We've also installed a new flow wrapper on line three that will increase its speed by 40%.
Longer term we also need to look at whether we can expand the site if we carry on growing at our current rate.
We're making improvements all the time, so it can be very rewarding, although it still makes me laugh thinking about the odd 'complaints' we get from customers. We had one person that said, "this cheese is smelly" - well yes - it's supposed to be!
Do I like the job? I love it. Well maybe not at Christmas! I'm always on the end of a telephone in the evenings when I finish, and because I live so near to the company, I'll often pop in if we need to deal with a late order or something has come up.
It makes me feel better knowing that everything is sorted.
INTERVIEW BY ELAINE WATSON
FACTORY FACTS
Location: Ilchester Cheese Company, Somerton Road, Ilchester, Somerset, BA22 8JL. Tel: 01935 842 825
Employees: 120 (60 in production) - rising to over 200 at Christmas
Products: Well over 20 flavours in sizes varying from 20g chuckles to 185g blocks to 4kg wheels in wax or vac bags; 85% branded, the rest supermarket own-label
Turnover: £20.3M (2005) - showed 22.5% growth between 2003 and 2005
Customers: Supermarkets, some foodservice clients and export (30% of the business)
PERSONAL
Name: Looby Armstrong
Age: 50
Career highlights: Moving up the ranks at Ilchester from operator to line leader, then shift controller, planner, assistant manager and finally production manager (three years ago)
Domestic: Married to Ilchester's warehouse and distribution manager Robert Armstrong. "We've got a rule that we don't talk shop once we get beyond the gates!"
**Outside work:*8 "I like two holidays abroad a year. I also love dining out - and cheese, which is odd considering I work with it every day!"
