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Chicago Tribune
March 28, 1993 Milk that's not East Dundee company specializes in duplicating the stuff of life for the animal kingdom Author: Paula Lauer. Edition: FINAL EDITION Section: TEMPO NORTHWEST Page: 1 Index Terms: AGRICULTURE FOOD BUSINESS INTERVIEW Estimated printed pages: 8 Article Text: As the receptionist at Milk Specialties Company in East Dundee, Madeline Beane is accustomed to fielding inquiries from people interested in home milk delivery and teachers looking for educational material on nutrition, and the occasional passing motorist in search of ice cream Unfortunately, Beane, of Carpentersville, can't help them. Indeed, while Milk Specialties does deliver and they are on the cutting edge of nutrition, what they actually manufacture is milk replacers for baby animals (calves, pigs and lambs) as well as specialized animal feeds, including baby formula for puppies and kittens. For the record, they've never made ice cream. Venture into your local pet store and you'll find their products, from Famous Fido doggie treats-with items like, Barbecue Bones, Mini Beagle Bagels and Terrier Twists among those available-on through KMR kitten weaning formula. Pay a visit to farm supply stores like Marlowe Feed and Hatchery Inc. in Huntley or Burton Farm Supply in Harvard and you'll see local farmers hefting 50-pound bags of Wayne Feeds' Calf Nip Milk Replacer powder or Kent Feeds' Lamb Milk Replacer manufactured to order by Milk Specialties. And chances are good that that glass of milk, veal cutlet or bacon-cheeseburger you last consumed was fortified indirectly by a Milk Specialties product. Although this privately held corporation has had its headquarters along the banks of the Fox River since 1955, they've gone about their work rather quietly. Many locals have no idea what goes on behind the doors of the historic building, which used to house a Borden condensed milk plant and, later, a mushroom factory that employed POWs during World War II. But with three plants in Illinois and two in Wisconsin collectively employing more than 300 people, and annual sales figures in the $100 million range, Milk Specialties is well known as an aggressive leader in the animal feed industry. Said Richard H. Severson, president of Kent Feeds Inc. based in Muscatine, Iowa: ``I happen to know through my association with the American Feed Industry Association that they have an excellent reputation throughout the whole nation. We've been doing business with them for over 25 years and they've been an excellent supplier in all areas for us. They are kind of a leader in providing the types of products they do.'' Milk Specialties is the largest manufacturer of milk replacers in the United States, with a good percentage of its sales through private label manufacturing (their name doesn't appear on the bag) of milk replacers for nationally recognized feed companies like Kent. Sort of a Similac for animals, milk replacers are used in much the same way as baby formula for humans. In most cases, it's often necessary to supplement the mother's milk, particularly in pigs, because today's sow is often producing more offspring than she can nurse. In the case of the baby cow, a milk replacer allows the farmer to sell the mother cow's milk and still raise a healthy calf. By drying whey and combining it with other fats, proteins and vitamins and minerals, Milk Specialties is able to create a flowable powder that, when mixed with water, is the next best thing to a mother animal's milk. According to Sleepy Hollow's Erwin Clark, senior vice president and general manager of the specialty products division, Milk Specialties manufactures and packages milk replacer formulations to order for just about every major feed company in the country, including Freeport-based Furst-McNess Company, Moorman Manufacturing Company out of Quincy and Purina Mills Inc. based in St. Louis, Mo. ``They have an outstanding reputation in the feed side of the industry,'' noted David Bossman, president of the American Feed Industry Association, based in Arlington, Va. ``They've embarked, I know in the last couple of years, on a very sophisticated and ambitious quality assurance program, which has been very good for them, and they're leading the industry in this.'' According to Milk Specialties chairman and CEO George Gill of Elgin, that quality assurance starts with raw materials. ``As one of the largest buyers of raw materials in the field, we have the opportunity to draw from some of the major suppliers in the country,'' he said. ``We place heavy emphasis on the quality of our raw materials, and instead of waiting to see if they meet our specifications, we reach out and work with our raw materials sources to ensure that what they're manufacturing or processing or collecting conforms with the specifications that we're seeking. We've even been able to affect some changes in their production process to achieve that.'' Besides nationwide distribution, most of Milk Specialties products are also distributed in places such as Korea, Japan, Europe, Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean and Taiwan. Gill said after obtaining a foreign trade zone designation in East Dundee last year, they'll be able to compete internationally on an even larger scale (currently about 10 percent of their products are exported). ``The real advantage (of foreign trade zone status) is we're able to sell more product,'' explained Gill. ``It allows us to bring in raw materials that are otherwise restricted by quota, process them with other domestically produced raw materials and re-export them.'' Besides producing milk replacers for export, the East Dundee facility houses the company's main offices (decorated with a subtle cow motif) and manufactures veal feed, custom nutrient blends and vitamin and mineral pre-mixes, which are used in the company's four other plants in Huntley, Hampshire and New Holstein, and Boscobel, Wis. Under the umbrella of the company's wholly owned subsidiary, Elgin-based Pet-Ag Inc., which has a plant in Hampshire, the company manufactures its nutritional supplements for dogs, cats and birds, milk replacers for puppies and kittens, Rawhide brand bones and chewies, Famous Fido dog treats, skin and coat conditioners, feed supplements for poultry, dairy and beef cattle, and a line of milk products for orphaned or rejected zoo mammals, called Zoologics. According to Pet-Ag president Wally Quednau of Bloomingdale, these products are marketed in about 35 countries around the world. And under Milk Specialties' National Division in New Holstein, they manufacture mink and fox feeds and high-energy dog food, including National's Breeders Blend for sport and work dogs, originally created at the request of a customer for sled dogs racing in Alaska's world-famous Iditarod. But it was in farm animal feeds that the company got its start back in 1944. Founded by West Dundee residents William F. Oatman Jr. and Oatman's partner and brother-in-law, Merle Nesbit, the company was a pioneer in using dried whey as a raw material for animal feed long before recycling was a fashionable concept. ``Whey is a byproduct of cheese manufacturing,'' Nesbit explained from his West Dundee home. ``Back then, it was a problem for the cheese manufacturers to get rid of it. They were dumping it in the streams, and it would pollute the stream and kill the fish.'' Cheese plants would also spread whey on the land or run it through sewage plants to get rid of the stuff. According to Nesbit, who at 89 still keeps in touch with the company's board of directors, Midwest Dried Milk Company, the predecessor to Milk Specialties, had tapped into the then-fledgling milk replacer market by the early 1950s with its DARI-DRI Calf Formula. Timing was on their side. By 1955, the same year they purchased the East Dundee plant, they had amassed an impressive list of major feed companies anxious to work with Milk Specialties as their private label milk replacer supplier. Today Milk Specialties maintains a top position in the industry through high quality standards in both its raw materials and finished products and a research and development effort that is unmatched, Gill said. ``One of the things we're trying to do is advance the science of animal nutrition,'' said Trevor Tomkins, vice president of research and quality assurance. Tomkins, of Sycamore, oversees and coordinates research projects at the company's testing facilities in Boscobel as well as 25 to 30 ongoing projects at universities around the country, including the University of Illinois, Cornell, Texas A&M, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. These projects range from testing feeding equipment, experimental pen designs or different natural antibodies to experimenting with new ways of using raw materials such as soy and wheat isolates (specifically, concentrated protein). ``Our objective is to improve and enhance diets which are very critical for the young animal,'' Gill explained. ``A human baby will double its weight in about six months; the baby pig, for example, will double its weight in 14 to 21 days, so obviously nutrition must be real accurate and very ideal to achieve those important growth cycles, and it's during those early days that our products deal with, so we're very concerned about the care of these animals.'' Gill said this is a philosophy that has survived and evolved since the company was founded, on through two acquisitions by major corporations and finally a leveraged management buyout organized by Gill in 1986. ``Paying attention to quality and customer service has always been one of the things that's guided the company,'' noted board member Vince Nielsen, of West Dundee, who joined the company in 1957 and served as president from 1972 until his retirement in 1990. ``I think since the buyout (in 1986), I would have to give George and some other people even more credit for taking a more sophisticated approach to quality control-putting, if anything, even a little more emphasis on more sophisticated procedures, statistical process control, things of that nature.'' Indeed, their plants in Hampshire, New Holstein, East Dundee and Boscobel (which handles all of the internal whey drying and mixing of high-fat ingredients for various product lines), each have extensive laboratories where raw materials and finished products are sampled and analyzed. According to Marlene Petersen of Crystal Lake, quality assurance manager in East Dundee, tests on milk replacers alone range from the bioavailability of proteins, fat and ash content, mineral balance and pH to looks (like coffee whitener), overall taste (a lot like whole milk) and smell (sweet and buttery). ``Most of the ingredient base can be found listed on the wrapper of a candy bar,'' Petersen said. ``Almost all of our ingredients come out of the edible side of the industry, even the soy products, . . . and whey has always been a big one in the baking industry.'' Is all this sampling and testing really necessary for animal food? Without a doubt, Petersen said. Aside from nutrition being far more critical in young animals, she pointed out that most of these animals are ``in some way, shape or form involved in the food chain. There's a lot of concern to make sure that the stuff that's being fed to those animals is not adulterated, that it doesn't have some potential carcinogen. A lot of what we do is involved with making sure that, number one, it's nutritionally sound, and number two, that there isn't something inherent in our ingredients that will harm the animal or harm the end consumer.'' Petersen said the East Dundee lab also handles most of the testing for the company's Huntley plant. It's in Huntley that the milk replacer formulas are blended, treated so that they can eventually be reconstituted and packaged for the domestic market. This plant, with its prevalent sweet buttery smell and ear vibrating din, houses machinery capable of mixing four tons of product at a time (50-pound bags are filled at a rate of 12 to 14 bags a minute). ``We manufacture to order,'' Clark shouted above the four-story mixer and bagging machines, noting that the plant operates 24 hours a day, five days a week. Clark explained that each feed manufacturer works closely with Milk Specialties' staff of nutritionists to create a specific formulation. A wall-to-wall computer console houses more than 450 recipes and controls the amount of each ingredient being dumped into the mixer. Raw materials, which are stacked 20 feet high in the adjoining warehouse, include various dried whey mixes, protein concentrates, delactose whey and dry skim milk. Once the formula is complete, the mixture goes through a process known as gentle agglomeration (a percentage of moisture is added back into the powder so that when it's combined with water, it reconstitutes instantly with little stirring and stays mixed), a boon to the busy farmer or producer. ``When we are producing products for others and our name doesn't appear on it, there has to be a lot of trust,'' said Gill. ``A customer's trust also comes up in our branded products, that they can rely on us to have the product that they need that will do the task that they purchased it for,'' he said, ``whether it's to feed an orphaned kitten or to help with scours (diarrhea in calves) or whether it's to assist in increasing the output of their dairy cow. ``What I feel good about is that we are contributing at an extremely important stage in the production of products for the food chain, that we assist in the process of feeding our people. ``On the other hand, with companion animals we are contributing to the pleasure and care that comes with those animals. I think that our company and our people can take a lot of pride in the effort that we make in these contributions.'' Gill said his company also takes great pride in knowing that through its research and voice in the industry, it has had a positive impact on the treatment of animals, particularly on the agriculture end. ``Two percent of the people produce all the food that's grown in the country,'' he said, ``and that doesn't include the kid flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. Increasingly, the way the food gets from the farmer to the table is not well understood. With respect to animal agriculture, we are extremely strong proponents of top-flight animal husbandry techniques and practices and certainly would not condone poor facilities or treatment for animals. We're trying to assist with the improvement of animalgrowth characteristics, and we know that involves good animal husbandry practices, both in nutrition and care.'' Caption: PHOTOS (color): While quality assurance manager Marlene Peterson inspects a beaker of milk powder, Milk Specialties' CEO George Gill surveys some finished product ready to be shipped. Photos by Jim Prisching. PHOTO: Lab technician Anne Miller and Marlene Petersen, quality assurance manager, run tests inside the lab. Tribune photos by Jim Prisching. PHOTO: Karen Wisbar, quality assurance coordinator, conducts a protein analysis of a milk sample PHOTOS 4 COPYRIGHT 1993, CHICAGO TRIBUNE Record Number: 03*28*6\93030006.955 |
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