Who we are

The dairy cooperative was founded in 1918, initially processing milk and curd-based products. The dairy initially processed 3,000 litres of milk a day supplied by dairy farmers in and around Bad Bibra. The amount of milk delivered began to increase in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

After agriculture began to be reestablished in the aftermath of the Second World War, the board decided to build a new dairy processing facility at the location it still occupies. The new plant was completed in 1951 and had the capacity to process 25,000 litres of milk a day into butter, cottage cheese, milk products, and “Bibertaler camembert”.

Between 1965 and 1968, the dairies at Naumburg, Karsdorf, Zeitz, Heldrungen, Allstedt, Roßla, and Hayn were merged into the one at Bad Bibra.

The steady increase in milk supply led to the decision to build a new dairy processing plant in Bad Bibra between 1971 and 1973. The new plant could handle 1,500 tonnes a year.

In 1985-1986, the cheese plant underwent a further expansion and then had a processing capacity of 3,000 tonnes a year. This allowed the production of slicing cheeses to be further expanded. The daily milk deliveries to Bad Bibra had climbed to between 80,000 and 100,000 litres a day, depending on the season. The Bad Bibra dairy cooperative is increasingly a well-known producer of slicing ​​cheeses (Gouda and Edamer).

When the West German mark was introduced as the official currency of East Germany on 1 July 1990, it quickly became impossible to maintain production at Bad Bibra because the entire East German market had also collapsed overnight. All of the plants except Bad Bibra were closed in 1990-91. The workforce was slashed from 500 down to 90.

After German reunification, it only took Bad Bibra five years to leap forward. With the help of subsidies and a bank loan, it built the brand-new Burgenland cheese dairy has emerged, which Mr Heuser of the Dairy Industry Association has called “the most modern in Germany”. The plant with its phalanx of towers in glistening silver towns lies in the valley like a small town all its own. The lorries bring 850,000 litres of milk a day for processing to produce 35,000 (tonnes of) cheese.

In the presence of Minister of Agriculture Petra Wernicke and District Administrator Harri Reiche, Burgenland Käserei Bad Bibra opens its new speciality cheese factory. A new line to make the speciality cagliata cheese was established for around €7 million, including a state grant of almost €2.4 million.

In 2006, the 98 employees at Bad Bibra had turned 308,000 tonnes of milk into 30,000 tonnes of cheese. The raw milk comes from 130 dairy farms in the eastern states of Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Thuringia, and parts of Brandenburg.

On 01.07.2009, the operations of Molkereigenossenschaft Bad Bibra e.G. were transferred to Humana Milchindustrie GmbH, a subsidiary of the Humana Group, thus opening a new chapter in the dairy’s history.

On 01.05.2011, the business activities of Humana Group GmbH and Nordmilch AG were merged into Deutsches Milchkontor GmbH (DMK), thus establishing the largest German milk processor.