Pizza cheese from Kaonik on its way to EU - Eko-mlek to open EUR 4 million state-of-the-arts dairy in Serbia in mid-2012

(Photo: ekomlek.rs)

Aside from being used in restaurants, pizza places and households in Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania, the famous pizza cheese of the dairy company Eko-mlek may soon become one of the ingredients of the famous Italian specialty in the EU countries as well. The company from Kaonik near Krusevac, owned by Perica Jankovic, is a real example of how a Serbian village can survive by introducing contemporary technology to a traditional dairy production.

As Jankovic announced with eKapija, Eko-mlek plans to invest EUR 4 million in a new dairy that will be unique in Serbia.

- The current dairy is in a good condition. However, we have realized that this facility consumes up to 80% more energy than it will consumed by the new facility. By saving energy, the new facility will pay itself off in ten years. We will design a system that will automatically send whey from the dairy to a pig farm, which will be about 350 meters away from the main facility. All waste from the farm will be sent to a power plant that will generate gas to be used in the dairy - our interlocutor explains how the new system will function.

Jankovic says that the dairy's capacity will be increased from current 50,000 liters of milk to 100,000 liters of milk a day.

Eko-mlek was founded in 1992 and used to employ only members of the family, while today it has 72 employees.

The owner of Eko-mlek says that the best-selling product of the Kaonik-based dairy is pizza cheese, followed by mozzarella, kashkaval, smoked kashkaval, the Zdravinje white cheese, and others.

Eko-mlek won the Energy Efficiency Promotion Leader award, which was presented to this dairy by ProCredit Bank in late January 2012.

S.O.