By CASEY NEILL
A 500-year family history in the trade preceded NuLac owner John Gommans’ foray into farming.
He’s proud to be continuing the tradition that a recently traced family tree dated back to 1470.
“We own farms as well as a factory, and a retail outlet,” he said.
“We have farms in both Australia and New Zealand.
“We have 12,000 dairy goats ourselves and then we have another eight independent suppliers that supply us milk from their farms.
“I think we employ about 70-odd people in total.
“We have several of our children involved in the business – obviously not exclusively, we don’t have 70 children.”
The factory is in Keysborough and the Australian farms are in Trafalgar and Yarragon.
“I go there once or twice a week to look around,” Mr Gommans said.
The Yarragon site is also home to Gippy Goat Cafe.
“The last of our strategic plan was to have a place where people could see goat farming,” he said.
“The export farmer could come and see our production chain from farm, to factory, to product. Kids go there and play.”
He started the business in Australia in 2005 with wife Penny Gandar.
“We started off in goats in 1980-something in New Zealand, but our main business was dairy cows,” he said.
“It was all a bit early. We allowed that to lapse.
“Then we started off seriously again in 2000. We came to Australia in 2005.
“We flew 500 goats over in a plane from our New Zealand farm. We bought this factory and a farm.”
Making the leap into goat farming was “a novelty and a challenge”.
“There’s an ability to make your own industry. In cow it’s a far, far bigger business,” John said.
“We quite enjoy being in charge of our own space.”
In terms of competitors, “we would be on par with Meredith, but they concentrate more on cheese”.
“We actually don’t do much in the way of cheese, but we are the biggest exporter by a long way,” Mr Gommans said.
“Our milk powder range, most of it goes out as full cream milk powder and a baby rice with milk.
“It’s a first food for infants from about six months of age.
“Then we are making a range of milk powders for one year plus.
“In addition to the one year plus and the three year plus goat milk powder range, which have strong export focus, we’ll also have a mum product as a nutritional boost to the expecting or mother with newborn children, and a senior product for boosted calcium.
“Both of those have an export focus to them as well.”
Until recently, NuLac was known as UphamGo “which didn’t really describe what we did”.
“Lac is basically milk and Nu is new or nutritional,” Mr Gommans said.
“Our foundation is in goat milk products.
“A few years ago decided to expand our range, and we developed a coconut yogurt.
“Continuing on from that development as a business, we created some cow milk ranges.
“We started the Coach House Dairy range, with a high-quality chocolate milk.”
This year the product won a Gold Medal and the Champion Award for the best flavoured milk at the Royal Agricultural Society of New South Wales’ Cheese and Dairy Awards night.
Two new flavours – Cold Drip Coffee with Milk and Cafe Mocha – won silver and gold medals respectively at the Sydney event.
“The biggest part of our business is still the goat milk products, and in particular the milk powders,“ Mr Gommans said.
“Goat milk powder is widely sought after throughout Asia.
“It’s regarded as a premium product to cow and it’s easier to digest for many people of Asian origin.
“They may have a lactose intolerance.
“Export is about half our business.
“We’ll want to retain a balance between export and domestic.
“We see the cow milk products and the dairy-free products as national and powder much more as export-focused.”
