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The Dairy’s new lactose free low fat milk is hitting the shelves for the first time today.
The new product, designed with lactose intolerant islanders in mind, is packaged in orange gingham 1 litre cartons.
It marks the end of a nine month process commencing last August, when Guernsey Dairy started fully investigating the feasibility of producing its own locally-produced lactose free milk.
“An initial trial batch was made to test the methodology behind our research before committing to two larger production runs,” said Managing Director Andrew Tabel.
“This gave us the confidence in the manufacturing and testing protocols to ensure the lactose free milk achieved the same high standards as our traditional milk."
Pictured: Due to the popularity of the Dairy’s low fat blue milk - which totals 72% of overall fresh milk sales - the Dairy decided to focus on producing a low fat lactose free equivalent.
Laboratory staff carried tests for each trial and found no detectable levels of lactose - findings that have since been verified by an independent testing facility.
"It’s been quite a long process," said Quality and Compliance Manager Alex Tielles. "We’ve had a number of trial batches to make sure we have all of our testing processes in place in-house, and we sent the product away to the UK to make sure that it has less than 0.01% of lactose, which is really small."
Ms Tielles hopes that islanders will buy local where possible and ditch some of the alternatives that have become commonplace in the absence of a Guernsey Dairy option.
"A lot of those products aren’t really fresh, they have very long shelf lives. This product is a local version with low food miles, it’s fresh and it supports the local environment, so we’re hoping that all of those people will choose this over some of those imported alternatives."
Pictured: The new lactose free milk is packaged in orange gingham 1 litre cartons.
She continued: "The first couple of months we are aiming to produce 3,000 litres per week. We have some idea of what the market is, but it might also take a little while for people to know that we [our product] are there.
"We’ll be looking at coffee shops, restaurants and places that have been bringing something else in to fill that gap that we now have available locally, although it might take a while for them to stop using old stock and move to the local version."
The new product hits the shops for the first time today.
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