This week’s announcement that Leprino Foods is to close its brand-new Portlaoise factory sits at the intersection of Brexit faultlines and a deep restructuring of the Irish dairy industry, with a sprinkling of Covid delays and once-off technological mishaps in a low-margin ingredients industry that does not forgive them. Leprino, the world’s largest maker of cheese for pizza toppings, only opened the Portlaoise mozzarella plant in 2021. It was then part of a joint venture started in 2000 with Glanbia, which Leprino bought out in 2023. Since then, Leprino Foods EU, as it is now known, has failed to reach…

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