Glenisk set to rebuild carbon neutral plant

With yoghurt production due to resume at the Glenisk factory in Killeigh by mid-January, the managing director of the company says they will rebuild a completely “carbon neutral” business.

The Glenisk plant, which was gutted in a devastating fire on September 27 last, is to be rebuilt on the same site in Newtown within the next 16 months, and Vincent Cleary says the new facility will be entirely carbon neutral.

In a wide-ranging interview for the RTÉ Podcast Series, 'Core Values', Mr Cleary said the fire had “fast forwarded everything” and while he had been planning to eliminate all plastics within the next three years, he says the new Glenisk will now be a carbon neutral business.

The move is part of an overall strategy that could see the entire supply chain for Glenisk becoming carbon neutral, which would make them world leaders in their field of operation.

“Sometimes it takes a crisis to bring about change in an individual, or in society at large, and it will take about 16 months for the rebuild to be completed, but when we restart, anything we do will have no plastic in it - that is the clean slate that the fire has brought to the table,” he says.

With all raw materials and the manufacturing process leaving no carbon trace, Vincent Cleary says the only remaining part of the chain to become carbon neutral is logistics.

“I am waiting on Elon Musk to help me fill the logistical challenge of getting all our six distribution trucks carbon neutral,” he states, adding that this is going to be “the last piece of the jigsaw”.

Mr Cleary says rebuilding the Glenisk plant is going to be his “statement on life” and he also spoke at length about the health scare he experienced just two months before the fire. He suffered a cardiac arrest while on holiday with his German-born wife, Kerstin, and daughter in Clare.

He ended up having extensive heart surgery, and today he strongly believes his mission in life is to rebuild Glenisk from the ashes.

“My cardiologist said that ‘someone upstairs’ must have been looking out for me, and I was joking with people saying I didn’t know what upstairs wanted me for, but since the fire, I now know that rebuilding Glenisk from the ashes is going to be my statement on life.”

Mr Cleary admits that when the original Glenisk plant was being built 35 years ago “of course we made mistakes” and he says he plans to address some of the “possible shortcomings of the past” in the new build, particularly in the areas of the layout and design of the new factory.

“We have the opportunity to build a very modern, very environmentally-friendly and carbon neutral factory, and we will do things better,” he says on the podcast.

He also acknowledges that, while the fire that destroyed the Glenisk plant had set the company back “by a number of decades”, he has no doubts that the brand will “grow very rapidly” once full production resumes.

“Life will throw curveballs at you, but I look for silver linings, I survived my near-miss with my health scare, so that’s something to be cheerful about, nobody was hurt in the fire at Glenisk, and that is something to be cheerful about, and we can rebuild.”

Having survived the last recession, Mr Cleary is philosophical about life and about being in business. “Any company, particularly any company in the food sector, that survived and grew during the last recession will survive anything that comes their way, so we will survive this,” he said.