Cheese firm keeps 2 million pounds of trash out of landfills
Masters Gallery Foods packages a lot of cheese.
Cheesemakers typically send their cheese to the Plymouth-based company encased in plastic and packed into cardboard boxes.
The company has packing lines for private label, retail and food service customers at its multi-acre campus. After the cheese is cut, sliced and shredded at the plant, nearly all of it is wrapped in plastic again, then shipped to customers in the United States and Puerto Rico as well as Mexico, China and other countries.
Workers in the plant wear hairnets and gloves that need to be discarded every day.
All of that plastic, cardboard and other waste needs to go somewhere. But rather than just dump it into landfills, the cheese brokerage firm has dedicated itself to creating a sustainable future for itself, and for the planet.
To recognize those efforts, Masters Gallery Foods is being honored this year with the Distinguished Performer-Sustainability award as part of the annual Deloitte Wisconsin 75 program, which celebrates the state’s largest privately and closely held companies.
Just in 2016, Masters Gallery Foods avoided sending 1,896,600 pounds of would-be trash to landfills. It also saved 1,053,851 kilowatt hours with energy improvements to heating and lighting systems — enough to power 96 homes for a year.
Linda Mueller, the procurement manager for aged cheese, started the company on this track about five years ago. Mueller said a friend started talking about recycling, and she realized how much more the company could do. At the time, Masters Gallery Foods recycled only cardboard and corrugate.
“There’s a lot out there to recycle,” she said. “And when you think about the whole food industry — oh holy moly.”
Mueller said expanding the company’s recycling program came in steps.
Receptacles were put out on the plant floor, and workers were educated about the new program. Every item needed to be separated into the different labeled containers.
“Our plant manager at the time was really instrumental,” Mueller said. “He would go out onto the plant floor and do it himself. By seeing that, it sparked everyone else to do the right things as well.”
Masters Gallery Foods slowly added items to what it could recycle. In the first wave were label backing, plastic banding, plastic bags and shrink wrap. More plastic came later.
“Once you have everybody on board, it just gets easier and easier,” she said.
Mueller said she feels like the company has turned a corner. Paper and cardboard are recycled in the traditional sense. Some items, such as plastic bags, are sent overseas and processed to become rope and pulp. Other items are sent to other companies in the Sheboygan County Recycling Network to be used again.
“If it wasn’t Linda, not all the stuff would get recycled,” plant manager Adam Kroener said. “Anything that came to her attention, she would chase it down until there was a solution. I can’t think of anything she wasn’t able to find a solution for.”
The plant now even avoids throwing away those blue vinyl gloves and hairnets.
Just how much trash has the plant eliminated? The easiest way for Kroener to explain was to compare the number of times the Dumpsters are emptied. Before all the recycling efforts, they were emptied two to three times a week. Now it’s about once a month, he said.
The plant’s sustainability efforts have grown so much that Masters Gallery Foods hired two full-time employees to run the program. That helps Mueller, who is still trying to find ways to recycle more items and more efficiently.
The business is growing too, which makes the recycling efforts that much more significant. Output and staff have doubled in just the last five years.
Masters Gallery Foods opened in 1974 with two employees. Now it has more than 625. Its production facility increased from 40,000 square feet to 310,000. It is also building another packaging and distribution facility in Oostburg that should open in 2018.
The company said it could add another 200 employees in the next few years.
Sustainability extends beyond the plant. Employees can bring in paper, batteries, ink cartridges and small electronics for recycling. Non-working and unwanted holiday lights are brought in for recycling around the holidays; they collected 15 barrels of lights in the last three years.
All year long, employees can bring in shoes to be recycled; more than 1,300 pairs have been collected in the last four years.
Mueller said there were hurdles to getting all these projects in motion, but she just kept networking and asking for help.
“As soon as you start bouncing ideas, it’s amazing what’s happening with a little passion and sweat,” Mueller said.