By
TSEHAI ALFRED/VTDigger
A longtime plant manager is buying a recently shuttered Franklin County dairy facility and reopening it this fall, a rare bright spot for a Vermont dairy industry battered by a string of recent production shutdowns.John Ovitt said he plans to take ownership of the Franklin Foods plant Sept. 1 and will reopen it as Franklin County Cheese, producing some of the same line of products as the previous operation but on a smaller scale.“I have worked here for 37 years and been through all the changes and did not want to see it close,” Ovitt told VTDigger. While the workforce of the plant will decrease once ownership is transferred, starting at around 20 workers from the plant’s roughly 100 workers, the reopening is a promising sign, one state official said. At least three dairy production plants have closed in recent months.“It’s a ray of hope,” Anson Tebbetts, Vermont’s secretary of agriculture, food and markets, said.
After purchasing the plant in 2017, Germany-based food company Hochland announced earlier this month that it would shut down their facility in Vermont in August. Another major Franklin County manufacturing plant, Perrigo, also said in May it would shut down its infant formula facility, laying off 162 employees.
