He gets up at 3.30am so you can pour milk on your morning cereal or get the perfect froth on your latte. And he reckons he's got the best job in the business.
"It's a job for life. The team here are great, and there's plenty of room to advance."
Carl Norton is a lead driver for Fonterra, based in Te Rapa, Hamilton. He's one of the people who oversees the small army of tankers that travel through the middle of the North Island collecting milk from dairy farmers, 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week.
Early mornings don't worry Norton: "I was a dairy farmer for 13 years so I'm used to it."
He starts work at 4.30am (he only lives eight minutes from the Te Rapa HQ so the commute's not bad), taking over from the night shift who head off to bed once he and the rest of the morning crew turn up.
His day starts with a briefing of what happened the night before, and he helps clean up the tail end of the night shift tankers as they arrive. He's then responsible for giving the next team details of their day to come.
These day drivers turn up at 6am and hit the road at 6.30am. They are briefed before they leave and fortified by a jolt of coffee before getting behind the wheel and taking to the rural roads.
The routes change every day: "All the routes are GPS mapped and these are shown on iPad screens that are mounted in the cab. The drivers just follow the blue line."
The technology behind the drivers' GPS system is pretty sophisticated. The daily route is prepared by the planning and dispatch team in Hamilton central who take details of the farms and factories the tankers will travel to the following day.
That is then loaded on to some heavy duty software; the drivers all have their own log-in and find the route is revealed once they pop in their details on board.
If the technology underpinning the daily Fonterra pick-ups is hi-tech, so are the trucks.
"They really are top of the range," says Norton. "Volvo and Scania tankers, all automatic. They are a joy to drive, given the distances we drive."
Once the drivers are briefed and leave Te Rapa, it's Norton's job to troubleshoot and handle any problems arising on the road. The main focus is milk quality; to meet stringent standards the milk needs to pass a range of quality tests, including being a certain temperature when it's picked up.
While farmers monitor the temperatures themselves, the tanker drivers also need to do this. Any problems are reported to Norton, who passes on the details to the appropriate people.
"The drivers pump on a certain amount of milk, the temperature, composition and quality is then tested in the tanker and the results are displayed on a second screen down from the cab," says Norton.
"We're working for the farmers, so it's important they know if there are any issues to make sure their milk is collected."
Once collected, the milk is taken to the nearest Fonterra factory for processing - but there are other issues that may need sorting: machinery gets blocked and tankers can get stuck in the mud. The latter is a bit of a curly one - tankers are heavy and expensive to tow so it's important the ground is even and hard.
Tankers travel up to five hours from home base. This ensures they complete their day's work within the 11-hour shift; it's a long day but it's interesting work.
"You get to see a lot of the country when you're driving milk tankers," says Norton.
As well as farm to factory, the drivers also deliver milk to the manufacturers of various food products: "We do a lot of factory transits," says Norton. "The drivers deliver to ice cream factories, yoghurt makers, people who make sweets ¬- anything that uses milk."
Norton reckons he'll be in this job for the rest of his working life: it's a way of life and something he's passionate about. There are blokes working there in their 70s and they get up before the birds, along with everyone else.
Norton's been at Fonterra for five years and he encourages anyone looking for an engaging and secure job to think about tanker driving (he was driving tankers himself up until December last year).
"Driving for Fonterra is great. You're not just joining a team but a family of drivers - and I'd encourage prospects to consider joining the Co-op."
Brought to you in association with Fonterra. Search #431AM