 Poor financial performance has been blamed for the closure |
A dairy in Carmarthenshire has finally shut down with the loss of 200 jobs, three months after its closure was announced. Owners Dairy Farmers of Britain (DFB) have said they hope to sell the Llangadog site but would not reveal who the prospective buyers were.
If a deal is done, DFB said up to 40 jobs could be created at the creamery.
Saturday's ceasing of production marked the end of a 50-year tradition of milk processing in the Tywi Valley area.
More than 1,000 people once worked at four creameries in the county.
Poor financial performance has been blamed for the decision to close.
Some Llangadog workers have kept their jobs for now, including tanker driver Tegwyn Davies from Llandovery, who has worked at Llangadog since 1983.
"We will still be collecting the milk from the farms and taking them to Llangadog to be transferred to bigger tankers that will take them to another creamery to be processed," he said.
"It is hard and awful to think people have lost their jobs, we have made friends and they are losing their jobs but we are staying.
"I feel saddened and we don't know for how long we will be here."
Nigel Davies, of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW), said he hoped the redundancy package would be favourable to its members.
Carmarthenshire council said it had made arrangements to team up with the Welsh Development Agency( WDA), JobCentre Plus and education body Elwa to support those made redundant.
In April, the authority's director of regeneration, Dave Gilbert, said: "We will be doing all we can to help the creamery workforce find alternative employment within the area.
"Our aim, along with our partners at the WDA and others, is to help relieve this situation as much as we can, as quickly as we can."
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Our aim, along with our partners at the WDA and others, is to help relieve this situation as much as we can, as quickly as we can
