My 213-mile milk round
Dairyman’s amazing daily trek to meet soaring demand for traditional pintas
WITH soaring demand for milk in traditional glass bottles, there is a growing need for someone to make the deliveries. Step forward, Billy Rennie – the milkman with the biggest round in Scotland.
Rising in the early hours of the morning, he sets out on his massive delivery run – and covers up to 213 miles in a single day.
He transports hundreds of pints of full-fat milk – in old-fashioned glass bottles – from the tiny island of Gigha, where he was born and where his family runs a booming dairy business up and down the West Coast.
In all weathers, Mr Rennie travels through some of the country’s wildest and most dramatic scenery as his route takes him on ferries and along miles of winding country roads.
He admitted he loves his work, saying: ‘It’s not like having a real job, it’s good fun meeting all the customers when I make my drop-offs and I enjoy the amazing views as I’m driving.’
The 60-year-old works for the Wee Isle Dairy on Gigha, which was started four-and-a-half years ago by his sister Emma, 50, and her husband Don Dennis, 63. They own a herd of 60 cows that are milked on the farm.
The milk is bottled at the dairy, labelled, packaged and loaded onto the van.
Mr Rennie makes his deliveries on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with his week beginning with a 213mile milk round.
Living on the mainland, in Argyll, he meets the Gigha ferry at Tayinloan about 7am to collect the van full of milk. After a handful of local deliveries, he begins his scenic tour by catching the ferry at Tarbert, travelling up through Inverary and Arrochar to Helensburgh, then to Lochgilphead and back.
On other days he goes as far as Port Appin, 90 miles north of Gigha, or Campbeltown, 23 miles to the south.
Mr Rennie distributes Wee Isle milk – plus the dairy’s own ice cream and flavoured sauces – to small shops, cafes and petrol stations. The firm also hires delivery companies to send its milk farther afield, to customers in Fort William, Edinburgh and even as far south as London.
Mr Rennie’s milk round has grown steadily in recent years, thanks to
the backlash against the industrialisation of food and a growing demand by consumers for a more traditional product.
Wee Isle milk is mostly sold in one-litre glass bottles, costing up to £2.20. Although it is more expensive than most milk sold in supermarkets – where a typical familysize bottle of semi-skimmed costs about 48p a litre – Mr Rennie believes people are willing to pay more for a premium product, especially one that evokes fond memories of milk deliveries of the past.
For decades, milk was delivered to homes across the country in the early morning when milkmen would collect the empties from the doorstep and leave fresh bottles.
In 1975, 94 per cent of milk in the UK was delivered to the doorstep in glass bottles, but by 2012 this had fallen to only 4 per cent. Environmental
concerns have led to a clamour for the return of glass bottles instead of plastic.
Another dairy in Glasgow is delivering 170,000 glass bottles a week, compared with only 30,000 two years ago.
In an effort to rekindle that oldfashioned way of buying milk and to encourage recycling, customers of the Wee Isle Dairy are asked to rinse and return their empty bottles to the shop they got them from, where Mr Rennie will collect them.
He has worked for his sister and brother-in-law since March 31, 2016, and enjoys the social aspect of his role that has allowed him to build a rapport with customers.
The job involves long days on the road but Mr Rennie said he does not mind because he wants the family business to be successful.
He said: ‘We were brought up on
Gigha and Emma stayed on the farm after my parents died.
‘She has a full-on job and has a far better ability at farming than I ever could.
‘And Don has such a kind heart and goes to great lengths to keep customers happy. Him and I hit it off straight away and we have a good working relationship.
‘It’s great being part of the family business.’