On Board With The Chairman - February 2025
Dear Member-Owners,
Your Board of Directors held their monthly meeting last week at the Visalia headquarters to go over the month of January business. Brad was up first and gave his market updates and the CDI’s strategies as we go into the first half of the new year. With the tariff talks swirling around so fast and the ever wondering if and when they’ll happen, this is one of the biggest moving targets for the Co-Op as well as us on farm. The staff has done an exceptional job at putting us in the best position going forward.
Jason Allen provided a first look at 2025 financial performance. While some areas of the business have started stronger than others, overall, January’s core business results were in line with budget expectations. Cost-cutting measures taken in 2024 are paying dividends in the new year, and we are trending in the right direction, but key activities that will come to fruition in 2025 (Valley Natural Beverages and Lactoferrin topping that list) must be commercialized in order to fundamentally improve our financial trajectory.
Patti Smith gave us her update on the Ingredients Group. Patti and her team have been busy on the powder side working on inventory management, and we are in a great position going into this year. They’ve been busy setting up new contacts across the globe to expand our market reach with the help of some funding from DMI to offset some of those costs for the new personnel. The Ingredients team also has their radar on alert with the tariff talks swirling around and updated us on the actions that they’ve taken. Patti also updated us on the Lactoferrin project going on at Turlock North. That project is expected to be completed by mid-March, and we should have sample products to ship to customers by the end of March.
Michael Burdeny was up next to give us updates from the Consumer Products Group. Michael’s first update was on Valley Natural Beverages(VNB) and the progress to date. As of this update, VNB has been taking a couple of loads of milk weekly to process different products and send them off for testing and approval. Peter Ernster and Troy Hancock continue to drive this plant to the finish line, which should be running milk consistently by the middle of March. We extend a huge thank you to Peter and Troy, and the team they’ve assembled to manage and run this new plant and continue to provide top-quality products and nutrition to the world. We look forward to seeing VNB at the ribbon cutting on April 30th, following the Annual Membership meeting. Michael also showed us a new packaging for butter (the “cube”) that we’re producing at the Visalia plant, and you should see that on the shelves soon.
Rob Vandenheuvel gave his report on the operations of the plants. As we have all felt in the last couple of weeks, milk pickups have been an issue around the valley. These hiccups are due to some customer plants having long downtimes, some planned and some not intended, and that has resulted in extra loads showing up at the doorstep of our plants. Please remember that if your farm is getting full, call the No Spill Hotline(877-390-2338) with ample time to give the transportation team time to move things around. I want to thank the men and women who answer the phones around the clock in the transportation office and their dedication to trying to get trucks moved around as fast as possible.
As always, if you have questions, please feel free to reach out to me or any of the board members directly. We continue to pray for this beautiful country that we live in and we pray for the leaders of this country to lead us in a way the glorifies our Lord.
All the best,
Cory Vanderham
Chairman of the Board
Vanderham West Dairy
Lazy V Farms
559-269-9618
