In Feb. 2016 Maytag Dairy Farms recalled about 900 pounds of cheese after the Iowa Dairy Products Control Bureau discovered listeria contamination during routine testing.

Now, the owners of Maytag Dairy Farms said they have plans to restart production at their Newton cheese plant.

Patt Johnson of The Des Moines Register reports that while on long-term hiatus, the 75-year-old company has been “completing significant renovations and remodeling our small cheese plant in an effort to meet and exceed new regulatory requirements mandated by the federal Food Safety Modernization Act,”  said John Dannerbeck, chairman of the Maytag Dairy Farms board of directors.

“We’re very excited and very optimistic,” Dannerbeck said. “We are going to be stronger than ever.”

There’s no specific date for getting production back on track, but Dannerbeck estimated that it would be early next year.

“The silver lining to all this is that we’ve been able to do significant work to adapt to new food safety standards,” he said.

 “While we now know this was a very isolated occurrence and there was no widespread problem, we believe our decision to vastly expand the recall, though expensive and immensely complicated, was the prudent decision at the time,” the company said in a statement late last week.