The last vestiges of Sinton Dairy, one of the Pikes Peak region’s oldest businesses and whose roots date back to just after Colorado Springs was founded in 1871, will disappear from the city when a manufacturing plant that was the company’s centerpiece since the mid-1950s closes at year’s end.
The parent company that owns Sinton Dairy, which was started by brothers George and Melvin Sinton in 1880 with a dozen cows and horse-drawn carts to deliver milk, will shutter the 9-acre, manufacturing plant Dec. 30 at 3801 Sinton Road in north-central Colorado Springs.
The facility’s 64 employees — who include front-office staff, manufacturing supervisors and hourly manufacturing workers — will be laid off permanently.
Dallas-based LALA U.S., a subsidiary of international food company Grupo LALA of Mexico and Sinton’s owner since 2009, made the announcement of the plant closing this week. Additional details of job losses were contained in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification or WARN notice that LALA filed with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, a federal requirement for employers when they plan mass layoffs.
The plant was once the mainstay of the Sinton Dairy business, and produced 220 million pounds of milk, 9 million pounds of cottage cheese and 3 million pounds of sour cream a year, according to a story in The Gazette in 2011.
Still, the plant hasn’t produced Sinton-branded products in many years; instead, it produces and distributes strawberry and chocolate flavored milk in three sizes, along with seasonal eggnog, under LALA’s Promised Land Dairy brand that’s sold in stores, according to a company spokesman.
In its announcement of the plant’s closing, which was emailed to The Gazette, LALA said it will shift production of Promised Land Dairy products to a new state-of-the-art co-manufacturing facility in West Virginia.
“We understand that this decision is difficult for our Colorado Springs employees, some of whom have been with us for many years,” LALA said in its statement. “We are dedicated to supporting those affected and will offer eligible employees severance benefits, a retention bonus, and resources from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment as part of our commitment to them.
“This important change will allow Promised Land to meet our loyal customers’ and consumers’ needs and expectations and to bring our extraordinary Promised Land Dairy products to new markets. Promised Land milk will continue to be produced with Jersey Cow milk and retain its distinctive rich and creamy flavor.”
The WARN notice said employees are represented by the Denver-based International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local Union No. 455; it was unknown how many of the 64 employees were union members. A union spokesman couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Friday.
What happens to the Sinton plant going forward hasn’t been determined, the LALA spokesman said. The property includes a 92,178-square-foot creamery built in 1956, El Paso County Assessor’s Office records show. The property also has an additional nine much smaller light-industrial manufacturing, storage warehouse and commercial utility buildings, according to the Assessor’s Office.
As described in Gazette archived stories and in a Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum page about Sinton Dairy, Melvin and George Sinton — teenagers from central New York — began their Colorado Springs business in 1880 and succeeded when they began milk deliveries to homes instead of requiring customers to come to their milk wagons out on the road to ladle fresh milk out of 5-gallon drums, as other dairy farmers required.
In the 1910s, Sinton bought cows from retiring dairy farms and grazed them on land that stretched from Prospect Lake east of downtown to Fort Carson, Gazette archives show.
“They started with (12) red cows to produce (14) quarts of milk costing 10 cents delivered daily with a horse-drawn wagon,” according to the Pioneers Museum. “Their first barn was built near the corner of East Willamette Avenue and North Corona Street in the Shooks Run floodplain, where the cows could graze in the lowlands and access the creek for water.”
Sinton Dairy grew to become one of the state’s two largest milk processors, and its plant, which employed at least 235 people at one time, produced milk, cottage cheese and sour cream that was shipped and sold to grocery and convenience stores across Colorado, according to Gazette archives.
In 1980, the dairy, which up to that point had remained in control of extended Sinton family members, was purchased by Associated Grocers of Colorado.
After Associated Grocers filed for bankruptcy in 1987, Sinton Dairy was purchased by Dairy Farmers of America, a cooperative of more than 24,000 dairy farmers, and Sinton’s management. Another ownership change took place in 2003 before LALA acquired Sinton six years later.
As part of the shift to producing ultra-pasteurized milk with a long shelf life, LALA replaced the Sinton name with Promised Land Dairy in 2016, according to the Pioneers Museum.
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