King Island Dairy to shut in mid-2025 after Saputo fails to find buyer for iconic cheese brand

Saputo says 58 employees will be impacted by the closure of the King Island Dairy in Tasmania.

Transcript

00:00Yeah, we've been mostly roaming the main street of Currie, which is King Island's biggest

00:07town today, talking to community members, locals, about how they're feeling.

00:13And a word that keeps coming up is devastated.

00:16They're devastated and sad, but not surprised.

00:19It seems the writing's been on the wall for quite a while now.

00:23We've still not been able to speak to the workers at this point, which is fair enough.

00:27They want to protect their future.

00:29But we have managed to speak to surrounding members of the community, which is everything

00:35on a small place like King Island.

00:38We've spoken to the pub who says they'll lose business.

00:41We've spoken to the retired dairy farmer who felt like for years he was pushing back against

00:46successive owners of this dairy, often multinational corporations, trying to fight for the rights

00:54of dairy farmers.

00:56We've even spoken to some connected to the school who worry about the impact of potentially

01:02losing a chunk of the children that attend that primary school here in King Island.

01:07We've heard that a lot of the workers at the factory are in their 20s and their 30s, have

01:12young children, young families.

01:14And if they go, that's kids that have gone from the school, disappeared.

01:19It's not the first instance of a major corporation shutting down an industry on the island as

01:25well.

01:26About 15 years ago, King Island had the capacity to process its own beef.

01:30It had an abattoir here that employed about 80 people, far more than the dairy factory

01:37here.

01:38That was closed by Brazilian owners JBS just over a decade now.

01:43And the community still remembers the fallout from that.

01:46It took them years to recover, they said.

01:49There was a bit of hope offered in the boom of tourism that came with the golf courses

01:53that started.

01:54But over the last year after a terrible drought that they've been experiencing, the farmers

01:59in particular, it's just this news of the dairy factory closing has come at a really

02:04awful time.