Elmhurst Dairy, NYC’s last milk processing plant, to close
New York City’s only remaining milk processing plant Elmhurst Dairy located in Jamaica, Queens will shut down operations for good later this year after nearly a century of business.
According to a WARN notice filed with the New York Department of Labor, the plant will close on Nov. 13, though the 273 employees at the facility will be out of work by Oct. 30.
Max and Arthur Schwartz founded Elmhurst Dairy in 1919 to bottle and deliver milk throughout their Queens neighborhood. The family-owned company has been pasteurizing, homogenizing and packaging milk sourced from upstate New York farms out of its 15-acre processing facility in Queens since the 1940s. The company says it distributes its products to more than 8,300 independent grocers and 1,400 public schools around the New York area.
Company CEO Henry Schwartz told the New York Times the operation, which supplied 5.6 million quarts a week, was no longer profitable.
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