Clover Sonoma’s four brand-new 50,000-gallon stainless steel milk silos hover over the landscape in Petaluma, Calif. Before entering the dairy plant, one can get a window – literally – into the operation. From the sidewalk, a passerby can look through a window and see half-pint cartons of milk being formed, filled, sealed and stamped. Around back, company mascot Clo the cow smiles from the sides of the trucks and delivers her trademark puns, like “The Sound of Moosic.”
“All of our trucks come to the bottling plant at the end of their deliveries. They have to drop off milk crates that we pick up from our customers,” said Rosalie Burkett, director of quality assurance, who led Dairy Foods on a tour of the plant. “We manufacture all of our fluid milks here. We have trucks that shuttle back and forth daily to pick up product, and then take it to the distribution center,” a newly constructed 60,000-square-foot facility across town that opened in January.