Next to the distillery on the Grangestone industrial estate north of the town stands Nestlé's Girvan factory, opened in 1979 and now one of the company's key UK sites.
What it makes
Its main job is producing chocolate crumb — the dried mixture of milk, sugar and cocoa that is the base ingredient for milk chocolate. That crumb goes on to other Nestlé plants, notably York, where it becomes the chocolate on KitKat and other products.
So the line people in Girvan use is broadly fair: a good deal of the chocolate in a KitKat starts here. It is made with milk from Ayrshire dairy farms, which is why the factory is where it is.
Why it matters to the town
Together with the William Grant distillery next door, the Nestlé factory is one of Girvan's largest employers, and between them the two sites are a large part of why the town has an industrial estate at all. For a place of six thousand people, having a major distillery and a major food plant on the edge of town is unusual and consequential.
It is a reminder that Girvan is a working town as well as a holiday one — a fishing harbour, a distillery and a factory, not a resort that happens to have people living in it. See the history of Girvan.
