Alberta’s Agri-Processing Investment Tax Credit program is supporting the development of Canada’s first advanced milk concentration plant.
DIW Buildings & Land Corporation has been conditionally approved for a tax credit of around $7.6 million through this program.
DIW Buildings & Land Corporation (Dairy Innovation West) is a partnership between Alberta Milk, Dairy Farmers of Manitoba, SaskMilk, and the BC Dairy Association.
The $73.7-million plant, set to open in Blackfalds, Alberta, in 2025, will convert raw milk into a concentrated form that is more efficient to transport for further processing.
The new facility will create 185 permanent and temporary jobs and is expected to process up to 300 million litres of milk annually from Western Canadian producers.
Alberta’s Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation, RJ Sigurdson, expressed excitement about hosting the country’s first high-tech milk concentration facility, emphasizing that the Agri-Processing Investment Tax Credit program is attracting significant investments in food and agri-processing to the province. He noted that the facility will create jobs and reduce transportation costs for dairy producers who currently send milk as far as Manitoba for processing.
The DIW facility will employ an ultrafiltration process to remove more than half the water content from unpasteurized raw milk.
This will allow four truckloads of raw milk to be concentrated into just one truckload of milk components, which will then be sent to other processors to produce cheese, butter, ice cream, and yogurt.
This initiative will result in fewer milk transport trucks on the road, helping the dairy industry move towards its net-zero greenhouse gas target by 2050.
