He smiles whenever anyone says (Cacique) cheese.

The smell of iodine and other disinfectants hangs in the air so heavily one is reminded of a hospital.

However, it is not surgery that goes on at Cacique Inc. in the City of Industry, but manufacturing of cheese at what is perhaps the world's most advanced dairy plant.

And manufacture they do: One million pounds of milk is processed daily, converted into 100,000 pounds of cheese, for the nation's booming Hispanic food market. "Only about 6 percent of milk is solids," relates Gilbert B. de Cardenas, Jr., sales manager and scion of the family which founded Cacique 20 years ago. "And cheese is the solids and a little moisture. That's why so much milk only makes a little cheese."

Cacique specializes in the soft, pale-color cheeses found in mercados and bodagas -- and, increasingly, mainstream supermarkets -- from San Diego to New York.

Back at Cacique it is morning, and big-rig trucks, in pairs, offload their 56,000-pound milk shipments in hoses six-inches thick. Before the day is done, 20 such trucks will have emptied their loads.

And then Cacique (pronounced ka-SEE-kay) starts the process of converting the grade A milk into soft cheese, staple of the Hispanic diet. "After we get the milk, it is stored in these four refrigerated milk silos. They hold 30,000 gallons each," says de Cardenas, waving his hand at the cylindrical towers, which reach up 40 feet into a blue, spring sky. "The first thing we do, we test the shipment."

Back inside the building, he holds up clear, plastic vials of recently shipped milk. The vials will be tested for butterfat, solids, protein and other contents, and for the arch-enemy of de Cardenas, which is bacteria.

Everywhere about the 100,000-square-foot plant, there are safeguards against contamination.

Doorways, for example, have sunken mats, soaked under about a half-inch of iodine-laced water. That way, workers are constantly immersing their rubber boots in disinfectant, as they pass through doors.

Milk and cheese vats are routinely cleaned by computer control, as often as every four hours.

The air is filtered before it comes into the plant. Each batch of product is tested three times before it leaves the Cacique factory. Product is also tested constantly along its way through the plant, which employs 300 workers and has an in-house lab.

And everywhere, workers -- doffing plastic caps and gloves -- are hosing down equipment and floors. "We are fanatics about cleanliness," says de Cardenas, slipping on some water -- his wingtip shoes not properly suited to the oft-washed environs.

The near-fetishness about contamination stems in part from the listerosis bacteria that can infect "fresh" (non-aged) cheeses, of the type Cacique sells.

In the 1980s, a listeria outbreak, traced to the local manufacturer Jalisco, cost many lives. The outbreak reminded some older locals of the refrain, "Bad meat kills business." So too for the dairy industry. "We want to sleep at night," says de Cardenas.

The spic-and-span Cacique plant represents a $20 million capital investment and is the pride of the de Cardenas family, which migrated to the United States in 1968, after Fidel Castro seized their auto parts factory in Cuba.

The senior de Cardenas started Cacique in 1973, after learning that local Hispanics had limited selections on their traditional cheeses. With $1,300, he bought an abandoned cheese plant and has been expanding production and modernizing facilities ever since.

The junior de Cardenas oversees operations today, watching as milk is pumped from the silos through a pasteurizer and on to another set of vats, which hold 50,000 pounds each, where the milk is cultured, or converted, into cheese.

At the end of the process, Cacique soft cheese is extruded through a pipe, about four inches in diameter, and sliced into 14-ounce, two-inch thick slabs.

The slabs plop out on a conveyor belt, on which they are whisked by two workers, in a scene reminiscent of the famous "I Love Lucy" episode in which chocolates whir past Lucy and Ethel. "We don't speed the line up, though," jokes de Cardenas. But he adds, "Those workers are rotated out of that job (on the conveyor belt) every 20 minutes."

The pair of workers, hands moving like hummingbirds, place the cheese slabs into pre-molded packages, which are then heat sealed.

From there, the cheese is moved to refrigerated storage and ultimately shipped on Cacique's fleet of 20 trucks, which are propane-powered.

For the future, Cacique wants to crack into the mainstream market in America. "It is true, the Hispanics are the fastest-growing ethnic market in America," says de Cardenas. "But even if one-half of Los Angeles is Hispanic by 2000, that leaves the other half -- and we want to get into that other half."