Almost all the factories that were built in Soviet times have disappeared from the “face” of Kyiv or were abandoned. The Galakton dairy plant (Kiev dairy plant No. 2) was no exception. 700 meters from the entrance of the dairy there is a convenient transport interchange and the metro station “Levoberezhnaya”, Rusanovka with its entertainment venues, cafes, restaurants and the embankment, and the center of Kyiv is literally 10-15 minutes away by car or metro. The first victim of developers (and a useless victim – as of 2018, the territory had not been developed) fell Kiev dairy plant No. 1 on Zhilyanskaya street.
Kiev Dairy Plant No. 2 was built in 1961. The initial processing capacity of the plant was 400 tons of milk per day. In 1985, after the reconstruction of the plant, its capacity increased to 600 tons of milk per day. In 2004, the company was bought by Unimilk. In 2010, the Galakton dairy plant began the process of merging with the Danone company. A year later, the company had a total number of employees of about 600 people, and more than 150,000 tons of milk were processed per day (with the ability to process more than 450,000 tons).
But the Danone company faced a problem – due to the location of the plant, it was impossible to expand its capacity in any way, and it was expensive to transport large volumes of raw materials for its processing. The dairy plant was actually located in a residential area – because of this, it was difficult to comply with the requirements for product quality, safety and environmental friendliness of production. And it turned out to be very expensive to maintain a dairy plant in Kiev (the salary fund played a significant role here, which was larger than that of other dairies outside the city, and there was no difference in production and efficiency), and the land lease agreement with the Kyiv authorities, signed on 49 years, came to an end at that time. The former head of Galakton refutes all these arguments, stating that the enterprise was closed for one simple reason – the lack of workload at other Danone production sites in Ukraine.
In May 2015, the Galakton plant, after 54 years of operation, completely ceased operations. The equipment was transferred to 2 other Danone plants – the Kremez plant in the Poltava region and Danone Dnipro in the Kherson region. Now, on the territory of a former dairy plant, the area of which is 8 hectares, the residential complex “Galaktika” with 2,500 apartments is being built.
Where was the Galakton dairy plant?
Marina Raskova Street, 4 (Evgeniy Sverstyuk Street, 4)