The four black orbs — dark-tinted security cameras — watch silently overhead in a room filled with stainless-steel pipes. The pipes carry raw milk from four large holding tanks outside the building into two large metal cabinets that look like oversized car radiators.
This is one of the critical points in Cloverland Dairy's production process, where raw milk is pasteurized — heated well above 161 degrees Fahrenheit — and then pumped through pipes into other parts of the Baltimore plant for processing and packaging. It's also a spot that company officials, government regulators and independent auditors want to see thoroughly protected and sanitary, and free from tampering.
The four cameras are part of a network of 37, plus other security and auditing measures, that came with a new round of upgrades that the Baltimore-based dairy recently completed at a cost of more than $250,000.
It's part of keeping the milk supply safe. Cloverland, which traces its roots to a dairy formed by three brothers in West Baltimore in 1919, has been one of the milk industry's regional leaders for decades. It now supplies milk to Safeway and other large and small markets and convenience stores across the Mid-Atlantic.
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