Hi folks,

I wanted to give everyone a snapshot of how our milk gets from the cow to the bottle in the store where you buy it. It actually is a very complicated process compounded with the overwhelming  urgency of a highly perishable product.  Our operation is structured in such a way where we not only have our own farmers that supply milk strictly to us,  but we then process and bottle that milk right here at the plant.  My job here at the Creamery is to work with the farmers and also oversee plant operations, so I see the entire process from udder to bottle.

First, we send our milk trucks out daily to pick up farm dairy milk on a set schedule. We have a “local” route (Amish dairies located right here in Kalona) and a “south” route (Amish/Mennonite Dairies located in Bloomfield, Iowa, northern Missouri, and eastern Illinois). Those trucks have to go out daily, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, rain, snow, ice, or shine, because cows are milked daily and the minute the milk leaves the udder it’s deteriorating. The way the dairy chain works (when it is working well) is that everyone is very aware of the need for the milk to stay cold. Once milk reaches the 41F threshold, bacteria starts to multiply exponentially. It’s the presence of bacteria that causes milk to sour, go bad, get off flavors.  Having said that, summertime is very difficult in the dairy industry, and wintertime is kickback time. We like cold. We don’t like heat.

Our milk trucks load each farmer’s milk into the milk truck. Extreme care is taken in transferring the milk from the bulk farm tank to the milk truck in terms of sanitary procedures.  Typically Amish farms are not necessarily laid out with large milk truck access in mind — more for horse and buggy. Wintertime snows and ice can make it very challenging for our drivers to negotiate the winding narrow lanes and random buildings to be able to pull up to the milk house.

Once the milk truck is full, or the route is completed, the truck heads back to the Creamery and our receiving station. Each truck is carefully backed into our receiving bay — the bay is such that with the larger milk trucks we might have less than 8 inches between the front of the truck and the overhead door and the back of the truck and the wall. Our milk receiver extraordinaire Paul Bender then will go through the procedure of unloading the truck into the plant, where we then shift it around to process and bottle.

One the milk is bottled  it is shrink-wrapped into cases and then “palletized”. We load the milk onto trucks and off they go to either stores or distributors. Due to the nature of our product in terms of processing, our milk is very perishable. We don’t homogenize and our pasteurization temperature is as low as regulations will allow. We do this because we believe the closer to the raw product we can get, the better tasting and the better for you our milk becomes.

Because of this philosophy, our milk cannot sit on store shelves for months at a time.  Our product is not a national product — we can only go out so far in distribution. The farthest out we can go is Atlanta, Georgia, and the only reason we can do that is because we go directly to one store (Dekalb) and that one store orders a full truck load.

The amazing thing about milk is that it must be handled correctly day-in and day-out, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year forever. No screw ups. Keeping it cold. And this includes the you, the customer — you cannot leave our milk out in the warm air and expect the milk to keep.

It amazes me daily to see what we do to ensure the milk we bottle is a high quality product, given the extreme perishability. We could be like the “big boys” and ultra-pasteurize the milk at 200F degrees so that the shelf-life could be in terms of months instead of days. But we believe in what we do and we hope you do, too!! Thanks for checking us out!