IN Brief:
- Rowan Glen is investing more than £600,000 alongside a £400,000 Scottish Government grant at its Palnure dairy.
- Factory reconfiguration, new production equipment, and high-care filling capability will support cottage cheese and other chilled dairy formats.
- The programme broadens the plant’s product mix while creating additional outlets for locally sourced milk, skimmed milk, and separated cream.
Rowan Glen is investing more than £1 million at its Palnure dairy in Dumfries & Galloway, adding production equipment, reconfiguring the factory, and preparing the site to manufacture cottage cheese alongside its established cultured dairy range. The programme combines more than £600,000 of company investment with a £400,000 Scottish Government grant.
Work is scheduled for completion by March 2027 and covers several areas of the factory rather than a single replacement line. The project will improve the production layout, install new machinery, and establish a high-care environment across filling operations, allowing the plant to handle a broader mix of chilled dairy products and pack formats.
Bulk cream production forms part of the diversification programme alongside cottage cheese. Both give Rowan Glen additional ways to use the milk arriving at Palnure, where all current supply is sourced from farms in Dumfries & Galloway. Cottage cheese creates an outlet for skimmed milk, while separated cream can be sold to other food manufacturers.
The investment follows a difficult period for the factory, which closed under its previous owner in 2022 before being brought back into production by a nine-person restart team. Employment has since rebuilt to around 30 people, and the operation now manufactures about 20 million pots and bottles of cultured dairy products each year for retail and foodservice customers.
Adding cottage cheese changes more than the product list. Yoghurt production already relies on controlled milk reception, pasteurisation, standardisation, fermentation, chilling, filling, and cold storage, but cottage cheese introduces curd formation, separation, handling, and different hygiene requirements. Expanding the filling area into a high-care environment gives Rowan Glen a cleaner route to introduce those products without forcing every new format through infrastructure designed around the existing yoghurt range.
The factory will also have to manage a more complicated production schedule. Different chilled products can require separate filling heads, containers, seals, cleaning regimes, allergen controls, temperatures, and shelf-life procedures. Greater flexibility only improves utilisation if changeovers can be managed without excessive downtime or creating microbiological risk between production runs.
Rowan Glen has already invested in the material balance around milk processing. Earlier support from South of Scotland Enterprise contributed towards cream separation, cooling, and storage equipment, reducing reliance on externally processed cream and allowing more of the raw milk stream to be handled at Palnure. The latest programme extends that approach into finished-product manufacture.
The timing coincides with wider investment in cottage cheese capacity. Rodda’s is developing a £6 million dedicated cottage cheese facility in Cornwall, while other UK dairies have been expanding production as the category attracts greater retail demand. The attraction for processors lies partly in consumer interest in high-protein chilled foods, but the factory economics still depend on milk utilisation, filling efficiency, refrigeration, packaging, and achievable selling prices.
Palnure has an advantage in that much of the underlying infrastructure is already present. Milk reception, cold storage, utilities, laboratory systems, hygiene controls, warehousing, and supermarket distribution have been rebuilt since the restart. Capital can therefore be directed at the process stages and filling environment needed for additional products rather than recreating the whole manufacturing site.
The £400,000 public grant comes through Scotland’s Food and Drink Processing Scheme, which is supporting projects covering machinery, automation, grading, packing, storage, and new processing capacity. Rowan Glen received the maximum award listed for its project, with the funding specifically allocated to diversification into cottage cheese and bulk cream.
The investment could also allow greater volumes of locally produced milk to be processed in south-west Scotland. Additional intake has value only where the factory can convert it into products carrying sufficient margin to absorb energy, labour, refrigeration, packaging, and distribution costs, making the broader product range central to the expansion rather than an incidental addition.
High-care filling capacity should give Rowan Glen room to add further chilled products after cottage cheese, although each new range will still require commercial demand and production validation. Filling flexibility can reduce the need for completely separate lines, but it does not eliminate the cleaning, traceability, specification, and changeover work attached to a larger SKU portfolio.
The Palnure programme is therefore another stage in rebuilding an existing dairy rather than a greenfield expansion. The first task after the 2022 closure was to restore production; later investment improved milk handling and cream separation, and the current £1 million-plus project is intended to broaden what the factory can make.
By March 2027, Palnure is expected to combine its established yoghurt operation with cottage cheese, bulk cream, and a more flexible high-care filling environment. The useful test will be whether that broader product mix increases milk utilisation and factory throughput without sacrificing the hygiene control and line reliability required across the existing business.
