Minchinbury, New South Wales - mid-20th century-2010s

Peters' Ice Cream Factory

Peters' Ice Cream, founded in Sydney in 1907, is one of Australia's oldest food brands. The Minchinbury facility in Western Sydney was built to service a national market, positioned for road and rail access to distribution networks across NSW and beyond. Nestlé acquired the Peters' brand in 1990.

Ice cream manufacturing at industrial scale is a cold chain operation. The production floor ran at temperatures consistent with the product from mixing through to packaging. The equipment, including mixing tanks, extrusion lines, freezer tunnels, and hardening rooms, was arranged around the sequence of that process. Workers moved through a facility designed to keep the product at temperature at every stage.

Production at Minchinbury wound down as Nestlé rationalised its Australian manufacturing operations. The factory closed and sat. The stainless steel and tile surfaces of the production floor, the cold rooms stripped of refrigeration equipment, and the loading infrastructure remained.

The photographs were made in the factory in 2016.