Focus on dairy

What right-minded person would turn down numerous lucrative domestic and international contracts in order to sustain their recently acquired business?

Canningvale-based Casa Dairy Products managing director, Frank Letizia did just that, and after five increasingly successful years of operations he has no regrets, apart from not spending enough time with his fiancé.

Casa Dairy, an award-winning cheese, yoghurt and more recently ‘smoothie’ producer, had its beginnings at a small Nedlands factory back in 1981.

Mr Letizia, a 2010 WA Business News 40 under 40 Award winner, became involved in 2005 after working for 10 years as an accountant for the likes of BHP Billiton and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Mr Letizia’s brother, Vic, presented Casa Dairy as an opportunity for him to do something different.

Partnering with his brother and Casa Dairy’s long serving sales and marketing manager, Brett Murphy and operations manager, David Bates, Mr Letizia bought the business.

In his first year, Mr Letizia said he was approached by several multi-national organisations, including Coles and Woolworths, looking for significant contracts to supply their stores nationally and internationally.

However, Mr Letizia said the “tiny rundown factory in Nedlands had no scope to grow”, curtailing the company’s ability to meet demand.

He said an approach for a massive 12-tonne contract with a Chinese firm also had to be turned down due to the inherent factory limitations.

“We couldn’t make false promises,” he said.

After realising the restrictions of the original factory, Mr Letizia immediately embarked on an ambitious growth plan and began scouting for a suitable location to build a new dairy.

However his timing couldn’t have been worse as Western Australia was in the midst of the boom. Finding suitable available industrial land was his first hurdle and then once the site had been chosen it was a battle to secure builders while keeping a lid on construction costs.

More than three years of planning and construction, a price tag of $5.5 million, and plenty of 14 hour days created a dairy with five times the capacity of its predecessor.

The company now employs 18 staff at the Canningvale dairy, churning through 40,000 litres of milk each week (sourced solely from the Mucca Dairy in Keysbrook) to produce more than 14 lines of yoghurt and 10 different cheeses, generating $5 million in turnover each year.

And Mr Letizia said he’s confident about recommenced contract negotiations with those companies he was forced to turn down initially.