By Staff Reporter
WEST SENECA, N.Y. — When Upstate Niagara Cooperative first asked Erie County for help with an expansion of its West Seneca dairy plant in 2024, the project was priced at $150 million. This week the figure is $325 million, and the farmer-owned cooperative is back before the county’s industrial development agency for more help.
The cooperative, which now does business as UNC Dairy, plans to add 231,410 square feet to its 222,851-square-foot plant in the North America Corporate Park overlooking the Route 400 expressway. WBEN reported Thursday that the project could add 130 jobs. The Erie County Industrial Development Agency has scheduled a public hearing for Oct. 27 on the cooperative’s request for a larger sales tax exemption.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz, who sits on the agency’s board, praised the cooperative’s choice of location. “Upstate could have made this expansion at any of their other New York sites but they chose West Seneca,” he told WBEN.
“Just like you can produce steel, you can produce yogurt,” Mr. Poloncarz said. “Expect to see a lot of cranes and construction equipment in West Seneca because of this project.”
A project that keeps changing
The agency’s own records show how much the plan has shifted in two years.
The ECIDA board first approved incentives on Sept. 25, 2024, for a 250,000-square-foot addition costing $150 million. The package included up to about $3.94 million in sales tax savings and about $6 million in property tax savings.
A year later, on Sept. 24, 2025, the board approved an amended plan. The building had shrunk to 165,000 square feet, but the cost had risen to $255 million. According to the agency’s project summary, the building cost went from $60 million to $93.8 million, and manufacturing equipment went from $90 million to $161.2 million. The incentives grew to as much as $6.125 million in sales tax exemptions, a new mortgage recording tax exemption of up to $1.89 million and an estimated $4 million in property tax abatements under a 10-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement. That came to about $12 million in total.
The agency’s project summary attributed the increases to “a rise in material costs” and “fine tuning of original estimates,” noting the “initial budget was prepared based upon rough estimates.” It also cited unexpected costs, including a new sewer line.
In August, The Buffalo News reported that the cooperative was asking for $12.3 million in sales tax breaks. It also reported a new problem: the company needed to spend $30 million on linear generators to power the expansion “because of a lack of electricity.”
The company’s case
In its application, the cooperative told the agency the expansion could technically go forward without public help, but would be smaller, the News reported.
“Although the project could be undertaken without the financial assistance of the agency… the agency’s financing is necessary to maximize the utilization of the expansion,” the company wrote. “If we are unable to obtain financial assistance for the project, we will cut back on the project, not creating as many local jobs and not utilizing as much milk from local dairy farms.”
When its board approved the $250 million version of the project in May 2025, UNC Dairy Chief Executive Kevin Ellis called it “a testament to our commitment to growing with our customers, operational excellence and long-term sustainability for our farmers.” The company said the plant would help it expand into Greek yogurt and cottage cheese.
Demand is not the cooperative’s only motive. In a Sept. 8 letter to customers, Chief Growth Officer Jack Hoops said “supply chain disruptions affecting key packaging and production materials” had hurt on-time delivery of Upstate Farms yogurt orders. “At UNC Dairy, we hold ourselves to a high standard of reliability — and over the past several months, we have not consistently met that standard with you,” he wrote. The letter said new capacity would come online in two phases, in late 2027 and at the start of 2028. That is well after the 18-month timeline the company announced in 2025.
What taxpayers should watch
The public record leaves several questions unanswered.
The first is the size of the new request. WBEN described the package now before the agency as “nearly $156,000.” That number is far smaller than the roughly $12 million board members approved last year and the $12.3 million in sales tax relief the News described in August. It is not clear whether $156,000 is an additional increment or a new total. The application on file at the agency’s Perry Street office should answer that.
The second is jobs. The 2025 resolution requires the cooperative to keep its 240 full-time jobs and create at least 110 of the 130 new positions it projected, or face clawbacks. The agency estimated the new jobs would pay about $70,000 a year. It calculated a 73-to-1 ratio of community benefits to incentive costs, mostly from projected payroll.
The third is power. If a major food manufacturer in a suburban business park has to build its own generators because grid power is not available, that matters for every other economic development project in Erie County.
The cooperative is owned by about 260 dairy farms, mostly in New York, and its brands include Upstate Farms, Bison and Valley Farms.
The ECIDA hearing is set for 3 p.m. Oct. 27 at the West Seneca Community Center and Library, 1300 Union Road, and will be livestreamed on the agency’s website. Written comments will be accepted until 4 p.m. Nov. 17. The board is expected to vote in November.
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