Lakeland Dairies and LacPatrick Dairies held a Special General Meetings in Cavan and in Co Tyrone respectively, on Tuesday afternoon, in order to vote for the decision of merging both companies, reports Newstalk.
The ballot were organised independently by the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society, resulting in 97.24% Lakeland Dairies’ shareholders and 95.99% LacPatrick’s shareholders in favour.
"By voting in favour of the merger, we are confident that both the LacPatrick and Lakeland shareholders have created a sustainable platform for dairy production in the northern half of the country,” said Andrew McConkey, chairman of LacPatrick, to Newstalk.
"This will create stability, scale, efficiency and further added value for our milk producers together with enhanced global market access for our high quality dairy products."
Alo Duffy, chairman of Lakeland Dairies, added: "The new society being formed through this merger will continue to be farmer owned and controlled while paying a sustainable and competitive milk price in line with market conditions into the future."
Lakeland Dairies
This new society is going to be under the name of Lakeland Dairies with 3,200 suppliers, processing over 1.8 billion litres of milk annually, yielding over €1bn.
Since the merge is still subject to approvals, the process is going to be predictably completed at the beginning of next year.
Both dairies companies emerged with the junction of enterprises, as Ballyrashane Co-op and Town of Monaghan for LacPatrick, and Killeshandra Co-operative and Lough Egish Co-operative for Lakeland.
LacPatrick, established in 2015, has 848 milk suppliers with 600 million litres of milk annually.
As for Lakeland, set up in 1990, has operations across 15 counties on a cross-border basis, collecting and processing over 1.2 billion litres of locally produced milk from 2,500 milk suppliers each year.
© 2018 Checkout – your source for the latest Irish retail news. Article by Maria Cabecos. Click subscribe to sign up for the Checkout print edition.
