And Andrew reckons that would have been “a crime” for the local community and the dairy industry.
Reviving a factory shuttered for more than six months wasn’t going to be easy, but Andrew saw an opportunity to invest and create a new-style dairy plant.
“It would have been a great loss for the industry and community if this site had ceased permanently.”
ProviCo Shareholders have invested nearly $90 million into reviving the plant as a next-generation global bio-protein hub.
He didn’t look back at traditional milk products and instead launched a protein pathway that continues to expand into global markets.
Andrew said it was a bit like being Steven Bradbury, the Australian winter Olympian who famously won gold when the other competitors ahead of him crashed.
“I was one of the last people standing in the race to purchase the site when everyone else had fallen over for whatever reason,” he said.
“I recognised that this site had significantly more to give as a renovated plant rather than as another suburb of Warrnambool if it had been bulldozed.
“There was a responsibility to make sure the chain never went around the gate again.”
Andrew founded his ProviCo Group in 1999 and has worked in the dairy industry for 30 years.
He has farms in Gippsland, and office and plant in Melbourne, in addition to his ProviCo Australia shareholding and commercial director role in Dennington, a suburb of Warrnambool.
He had looked at various sites around Victoria for a manufacturing base, but none were quite right.
“The opportunity to look at Dennington was appealing because, like some great Victorian homes, the core assets were incredibly good with a lot of useful life remaining; it just needed some imagination and strategy modernisation,” Andrew said.
“It was a challenge, but a calculated one.
“It was aligned to something we were already deeply involved with and had the knowledge of the customer base and of the dairy industry because we’d been procuring products for 25 years from other manufacturers.
“It was a big step, but it wasn’t without knowledge.”
The purchase was finalised in 2020, with ProviCo needing to step in quickly to get the plant up and running.
“The biggest challenge of all was the timing,” Andrew said.
“It had to happen quickly, and it happened right at the beginning of COVID. When we were settling in was the most difficult time.”
Andrew didn’t plan to make traditional dairy products.
“We saw an opportunity to design an updated value-added product mix based around protein,” he said.
“The trends had been obvious. The infant formula path that many had gone down in the dairy industry was pretty narrow.
“It’s a limited consumption period in a person’s life and the market is very focused on China, so it was a risky approach.
“We elected to look at a protein optimisation plant and that needed more technical and capital investment and that’s when the partnership occurred with Straight Bat which had acquired part of HPS Technology.”
The strategy was further validated when giant Canadian dairy co-op, Agropur, became a partner.
Andrew said the strategy was clear — create something new that would appeal to current and future markets.
“We in agriculture have been told for a long time that we shouldn’t just sell commodities; we should apply technology to primary products to make them more valuable,” he said.
“ProviCo is doing is just that. We’re told we should be the smart country, but rarely does that happen to the extent that I think we’ve been able to do in a relatively short time.
“It’s about producing high-protein products with a functional application.
“It’s not necessarily manufacturing anything; it’s fragmenting and fractionating what nature put in milk.
“ProviCo is looking at an asset with imagination and saying what makes that asset relevant in the next 30-40 years.
“It’s no use producing the products of the past.
“We haven’t sat and waited for opportunities to present. We’ve had an unwavering protein strategy that hasn’t changed.”
What has changed are attitudes towards protein and ProviCo has been well-placed to capitalise.
Andrew started sports nutrition business Peak Nutritionals in 2014, based around protein shakes.
At that stage, it was all about bodybuilders; now it’s about anybody and whole of life protein nutrition.
“Those tailwinds of change have supported ProviCo where some of the protein fractions that we produce have increased in value quite substantially,” he said.
“There was a big push during COVID towards protein, immunity and genuine nutrition rather than substitutes.”
Andrew said the protein path had been confirmed.
“We’ve got demand outstripping our ability to produce the products in stage two, even before we get to stage three,” he said.
“Nearly $90 million invested in the site speaks volumes for the commitment of myself and other shareholders to repurpose the facility with modern technology to ensure there is a pathway to develop products that ensures profitability and relevance for the next 30-40 years.”
He understands the importance of the plant to the local community.
“It’s got a multiplier effect. We renovated and gave a plant relevance and enabled another generation of people and suppliers an opportunity to be engaged in that asset.”
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