THE name of Robert Wiseman, known to the customers of just seven Lanarkshire milk rounds back in 1976, now features in half the fridges in Scotland. But for the real Robert Wiseman, who has recently had to watch his dairies being blockaded by angry Scottish farmers, being a household name did not help.

Wiseman, 50, and brotherAlan, 55, took over the business as young men 28 years ago. Since then they have swallowed 56 rivals, and in an all-too-rare Scottish entrepreneurial land-grab on the south they have created one of the UK's triumvirate of dairy giants alongside Arla Foods (Express Dairies) and Dairy Crest.

"Robert Wiseman happens to be a person. It used to be my father, it's nowme, " he says. "Arla is this great big conglomerate from Scandinavia, Dairy Crest is a plc, Wiseman . . . used to be in the Young Farmers at East Kilbride - that's a wee bit disappointing."

He is not referring to Wiseman's sound City credentials but to its visibility in Scotland, where it has 50per cent of the market, at a time when anger over falling farmgate milk prices - hitherto directed mainly at the supermarkets - has boiled over into blockades of the processors.

A price cut by Wiseman, swiftly followed by a matching one from Arla, sparked the protest amid shrill National Farmers'Union warnings that the industry is going to the wall and a report by the MilkDevelopment Council urging a new concordat to bring price stability.

In his homely office at the group's modest headquarters at Nerston, near East Kilbride, Wiseman brandishes the MDC report, open at the page, to prove his case. A time-series graph of the big three players clearly shows Wiseman always paying most, and always cutting last. He protests:

"They buy liquid milk the same as we buy it and sell to the same market as we do. Why should they pay 0.6p to 0.7p a litre less because we are more efficient?"

He goes on: "I was surprised at the speed with which Arla cut last month. They did put out a profits warning, so maybe they were a bit more pressured than we all realised, but why should the farmers pay?

The last reduction we made was trying to get on an equal playingfield. We are competing in all the markets that Dairy Crest and Arla are competing in and paying a price way beyond theirs."

The former piggery acquired by his fatherwhen Robert was aged four is now home to 100 staff, including a 60-strong IT team. It sits on a farm road overlooking a field of Friesian cows - the real thing, not the group's iconic symbol. It is next door to the house where the family was brought up, and where his mother, Jean, still lives after the death last December, aged 88, of his father, who continued to work full-time well into his seventies bottling milk, driving floats and cutting the grass around head office - not interfering inside it.

In his will he left GBP185,000, and bequeathed modest gifts to his four sons, including a grandfather clock to Robert. However, the chief executive's 15 million shares are today worth more than GBP45m, and last year he received GBP805,000 to head the 3800-strong business.

"I had the great benefit of having an older brotherwho had quite a strategic mind in his head, " says the stocky, energetic Wiseman, who managed the Great Scottish Run half-marathon last year, and who moves constantly around his office.

He says: "I was the farmer, I went to agricultural college, milked cows and grew tatties badly. When my dad turned 60 he handed control of the business to Alan and me - how many people would have done that? I don't know if I could have done that. I have got a 23-year-old son and a 19-year-old son and they are not in the business, they are at university . . . But when we started in the business we had seven milk rounds, nowwe have 1200 motors on the road.

"Nothing would give me greater pleasure than one of the family wanting to continue in the business. But I have never put them under any pressure to do that . . .

A long time ago, Alan, (brother) Gavin and I agreed we would never bring any of our children into the firm unless they had a skill we required - we are a public company."

Wiseman and his wife Paula take a close interest in what the youngest of their six children (ranging from five to 25) are drinking. "My daughter going to school takes two bottles of water with her every day - it's not fizzy drinks any more."

He jumps up again to demonstrate the "sexy wee package" of a Wiseman mini-bottle of "megamilk". "The whole climate has changed. Dairy products are actually good for you all of a sudden, and it's a live opportunity, now."

Wiseman is the key mover behind the current "milkmoustache" advertising campaign, featuring Mr Bean and others, supported by the Scottish Executive as part of its health offensive. Surprisingly, it is limited to Scotland.

"There are other people with different fish to fry in the south who are not supporting it, "Wiseman comments. "We should be developing a growing marketplace - if you look at the Scottish market . . . total consumption of milk has increased, it is in vogue at the moment."

The group's 1per cent-fat-skimmed milk "One" is already on the shelves of all the majormultiples and ahead of sales targets, while it has high hopes for its new extended shelf-life product "Pure" being developed with Tesco.

Happy to shoot from the hip on many topics, Wiseman is cannily restrained on the milkwars. "It is disappointing it happened, but I can understand feelings are high within the industry - the whole agricultural industry is going through change and that is not unrelated."

And on the multiple retailers, widely seen as instigating the downward spiral of pricing, he says: "They are our customers.

They sell the milk very well and very professionally."

In explaining how the business has grown, Wiseman's teaching aid is a wall-map of the UK in shades of green, which shows where the grass grows greenest.

"We have got a spine of dairies down the western side of the country, where the cows are. We make money out of turning wheels, we employ all our own mechanics and run our own garages. It is very important to keep control of all your own costs. We are a logistics business that happens to have a dairy at the other end."

The group is about to build a sixth dairy nearTaunton, Somerset, enabling it to process and sell milk from south-west farmers, who produce a quarter of the UK's milk, without transporting it up and down the motorway to and from the Midlands.

Cutting the "milkmiles" is even more vital as the industry grapples with higher fuel and energy costs as well as the all-powerful multiples.

Does his stake in the business matter? "I still think it is meaningful, and it must be for our customerwho says 'hey Robert, I want this sorted'. It is important to me and my family that I get it sorted."