On the morning of Wednesday January 10th, our group was off to another early morning here Argentina. We departed from the hotel at 8:10 for the hour-long bus ride to the La Serenisma Plant in Empresa, a town outside of Buenos Aires. Upon arrival, Mateus a public relations worker for La Serenisma greeted us. Mateus played us a brief fifteen-minute video to show us what La Serenisma is and what they do as a company. We learned that La Serenisma is a dairy company, founded in 1929 when Antonino Mastellone and his wife began producing mozzarella and other types of cheese in a small room next to their house in Italy. The idea was expanded upon once brought to Argentina. This once small company now has 11 full-scale dairy plants in Argentina. La Serenisma offers a wide variety of dairy product, some of which include milk, cream, cheese, and butter. La Serenisma has nearly 350 products in over 80,000 stores and multiple countries including China and Russia. La Serenisma currently has nearly dominates nearly 70% of the milk market in the whole country of Argentina. If you were to ask an Argentinian about milk, La Serenisma would be the first name to come to mind.
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| Arial view of the Plant |
La Serenisma prides itself on providing high quality dairy products to the Argentine people. The strict quality control standards of La Serenisma date back to 1967. La Serenisma gets milk from cows that are hormone and antibiotic free. While most companies pasteurize milk, La Serenisma ultra pasteurizes its milk. This means that opposed to the usual 99% kill rate of bacteria in milk, La Serenisma kills 99.9% of all bacteria in the milk. Although the local standards for milk must be less than 300,000 bacteria per milliliter, La Serenisma takes the extra step and offers milk that has less than 50,000 bacteria per milliliter.
We also learned that La Serenisma is a company that is heavily involved with the community as well as the environment. La Serenisma actually recycles 30% of all water used in its factories. Another thing La Serenisma does is keep the product waste to an absolute minimum. The company estimates that only 1.5% of all milk wasted because of bacteria counts that are too high. As far as the community, La Serenisma is heavily involved. La Serenisma frequently goes into local schools to teach children the importance of nutrition and a healthy balanced diet. La Serenisma is known for giving out many educational scholarships to local students. La Serenisma also works with the community in another sense by doing business with nearly 750 local dairy farms in Argentina. These farms are all in the upper middle of the country because here the weather is perfect for productive cows. The company works closely with these farms to ensure quality control and productiveness is at a maximum level.
After we watched this video, Mateus took us on a short tour of some parts of the Factory. We were able to see some of the production lines and quality control measures first hand. It was truly amazing
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| One of the many production lines on site |
seeing the precautions that La Serenisma takes to ensure the product is at correct temperatures at all times throughout production. Mateus also showed us some of the quality control laboratories that are on the property. These labs test for quality of the product by smelling, examining and testing the amount of bacteria in all dairy products on site. It was very interesting to see the measure that La Serenisma takes to offer such a high quality dairy product to the Argentine people.
After our tour was over, Mateus brought us to the cafeteria to try some products for ourselves. La Serenisma had a variety of products waiting for us. We were able to try a some signature products including milk, yogurt, and cheese. Everything was delicious! The whole group enjoyed this experience saying things such as "Normally I hate dairy but this is amazing!" and "I was expecting something amazing and my expectations were exceeded!”. Another Peer said, "I wish we had milk that tastes like this in the States". We never realized there could be such a difference in dairy products solely based on quality. Right before we were about to leave Mateus surprised each of us with a bag full of different dairy products for us to enjoy throughout the week. Luckily for us, none of these products needed to be refrigerated so they could be enjoyed at any time.
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| Taste testing! |
This trip was very educational and opened up a lot of discussion throughout our group. It made many of us wonder and question all of the artificial additives that used in The United States. It really made us wonder how healthy and how real the products that we consume are. This very memorable visit changed many of our perspectives about quality control and what is really going into the foods that we consume.
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