It’s the little things

Written by: Elizabeth Uthoff

Creating delicious, quality dairy products takes time and lots of hard work. Our team, at Dan and Debbie’s Creamery does much of our production by hand. But before the first stop of milk can be added to the jug, our team has to plan ahead to be prepared to bottle milk, make squeaky cheese curds, or create delicious ice cream. There are many moving parts that go into creating our delectable products- many of which people don’t consider when they enjoy our creations.  

Milk jugs have to be ordered ahead of bottling time, as one would imagine- but did you know that special milk jug labels have to be sent from the label printer, to the milk jug plant just ahead of the order to be applied? In the beginning, all of Dan and Debbie’s product stickers were adhered by hand. Now, all of the “Non GMO” stickers still must be applied by hand to every milk jug. Every sticker on a cheese curd bag is also had applied, by our Grandma Takes. We are truly a family owned business with quality in mind.

While bottling milk, our production team has to change the bottling machine parts every time they switch to a different size of milk jug (gallon, half-gallon, and pint sizes). This exchange usually takes anywhere from 10-15 minutes; the old parts are taken off the machine and washed while the clean new parts are screwed in. If you stop by the creamery during bottling time you can watch, from the viewing room, and you will likely see them changing out the different parts.

The process of packaging cheese curds is 100% by hand. We typically call all-hands-on-deck when bagging cheese curds so we can get them packaged quickly and get onto the next task. The five to six people bagging curds create an assembly line that packages, weighs, and seals the packages of cheese curds. This production line allows a bag of cheese curds to go through in less than 3 minutes. With five delicious flavors, we feel like the curds are worth the work.

When you enjoy a cone or a glass of milk from our creamery store you can taste the hard work that put into our products. Our goal is to focus on the little things and allow customers to see how important creating a quality product is to us.