Monday, April 4, 2022

Farm installs milk vending machine

Golspie Dairy near Woodstock will be installing a vending machine that can dispense milk and cheeses.

Maria DeBoer-Marshall said the machine is coming from Switzerland and will sit outside their on-farm retail store dispensing regular and chocolate milks into glass bottles that customers can either bring themselves or buy in the store.


She said the plan is to develop a business that will enable the next generation to continue to run the dairy farm that has been in the family for nearly 150 yeaars.


“The local community and tourists can just come to our farm and fill up a bottle of milk that was produced that morning or the day before,” she said.


“It’s definitely the freshest milk that you can get.”


Their 32-cow farm business was recently chosen as one of 150 small businesses to receive a Desjardin GoodSpark grant, $20,000 of which will be used to buy and ship the machine from Switzerland.


More than 6,000 Canadian businesses applied, “so it’s incredibly humbling to be one of those 150 picks,” DeBoer-Marshall said.


The dispensing machines are common in Europe, but this is one of the first in Canada.