In one corner, Mr. Pyykkonen imagined a milk bar where customers could add blackberry-basil or banana-almond butter to fresh milk pasteurized on site. Over by some derelict filing cabinets, he saw a case for yogurt parfaits and house-made ice creams.
“What do we call ourselves?” he asked. “A microdairy. Like a microbrewery.”
His company, 1871 Dairy, already supplies grass-fed cow’s milk to Chicago’s top restaurants, including Alinea, Next and Blackbird. In the coming months, Mr. Pyykkonen will move his processing operation from southern Wisconsin to this au courant neighborhood a mile west of downtown, where meatpackers and fish smokehouses are making way for small-batch salumerias and coffee roasters.
Add milk to the long list of traditional foods that are being rediscovered by young entrepreneurs and reintroduced in small-batch — and often high-priced — form. That 1871 Dairy aims to process organic milk in a city, far from the dairy industry’s rural roots, makes it unusual in its ambition.
But the advent of high-end milk is about more than just a fashionable business venture. As historically low milk prices leave many mom-and-pop farmers struggling, some are choosing to ride the wave of the nation’s new food awareness. They are eschewing the traditional model of selling to commercial processors, instead bottling their own milk (and ice cream and yogurt) and selling it directly to customers. And they are heralding the various ways it may be different from conventional milk — whether unhomogenized, organic, from grass-fed cows or locally produced.
Milk, by its perishable nature, has always been a local product; most milk in this country travels less than 100 miles from farm to bottling plant, according to Dairy Management Incorporated, the national trade organization behind the “Got Milk?” advertising campaign. Yet only in the last few years has it been widely marketed to consumers striving to “eat local.”
Now many restaurant menus cite the provenance of their dairy products in the same way they boast of grass-fed rib-eyes and hydroponic tomatoes. And consumers are willing to spend more for boutique milk at farmers’ markets and upscale grocers. At Whole Foods Markets nationwide, sales of grass-fed cow’s milk — much of it locally produced — have experienced “high double-digit growth during the past two years and will likely increase in 2016,” said Julie Blubaugh, the manager of local products for the company’s Midwest division. That surge is even more remarkable given the long slump in overall milk sales. Annual fluid-milk consumption has fallen to 159 pounds per person in 2014, from 247 pounds in 1975, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture. (Yet American milk production is at an all-time high, buoyed by demand for cheese, yogurt and butter.)
No group keeps statistics on the growth of microdairies; those with a producer-handler license, which allows them to bottle and sell milk directly to consumers, adhere to state regulations and are not tracked by the Agriculture Department.
But those who attest to the small dairies’ new popularity say a key factor is nostalgia.
Manhattan Milk, a small distributor in New York City, evokes the days of the milkman, delivering glass bottles of grass-fed, organic milk from dairies in the region to doorsteps as far away as Greenwich, Conn. At 1871, Mr. Pyykkonen said his plans include delivering bottles throughout Chicago by bicycle.
For Mr. Pyykkonen, a former employee-benefits consultant with no food background, the motivation to enter the milk business was personal. When his eldest daughter was moving from breast to cow’s milk about eight years ago, he and his wife began paying more attention to dairy labels. Among the limited options in supermarkets, they were struck by what they thought was a lack of transparency about the milk’s origin or method of production.
The research became enough of an obsession that Mr. Pyykkonen left his job and dived into the subject headfirst through books and farm visits. He named his company 1871 Dairy, a reference to the year of the Great Chicago Fire and the debunked legend that it was started by a skittish cow. By the summer of 2015, he had bought 12 cows of Jersey, Guernsey and Holstein-Friesian breeds, which are fed an all-grass diet. (The milk is not entirely local, though, as they graze about 300 miles from the city, in Wisconsin.)
The dairy pasteurizes the raw milk at 145 degrees, a lower temperature than at many commercial processors, which helps retain its healthful enzymes. The milk is sold at farmers’ markets and several high-end grocers in Chicago, and as with many small-scale food products, the sticker price makes it largely a niche product. At $7 a half-gallon, it is about three times as expensive as most supermarket milk — though it also has a mouthfeel as luscious as evaporated milk and a sumptuously sweet finish.
His customers, Mr. Pyykkonen learned, want more than the word organic slapped on a label; they want the satisfaction of knowing the milk was made close to home, in small batches rather than industrial vats.
In East Homer, N.Y., a half-hour drive south of Syracuse, a small dairy called Trinity Valley began bottling its own products in 2014 in addition to selling its raw milk to larger commercial processors. Branden Brown, who runs the farm with his wife, Rebekah, and her parents, Ken and Sue Poole, said they were losing money after several years of record low prices, and saw the chance to charge more for premium products.
“In this day and age, with the milk market so volatile, farmers have three options: You get a niche and process your own milk, you get bigger, or you get out of dairy farming,” said Mr. Brown, 26.
Trinity Valley became its own middleman in 2014, converting the cornfield across the road into a processing plant and retail shop. At first, it bottled 150 gallons a week each of chocolate and white nonhomogenized milk. (A layer of cream remains on top; the dairy also pasteurizes at 145 degrees.) In two years, the dairy has increased its output to 1,600 gallons a week from 300 gallons, supplying milk to Central New York hospitals, theaters and grocers.
“If we did this five or 10 years ago,” Mr. Brown said, “I don’t think the buy-local movement would have been as strong as it is now to keep us and other dairies sustainable.”
The industry’s lag in jumping on the locavore bandwagon is something the trade group Dairy Management concedes is a marketing opportunity lost. Alan Reed, its executive vice president for strategy and external innovation, said one way to catch up is to shine a spotlight on the farmers who produce the milk.
“The story about cow care, or reinvestment in local communities, can be told by so many dairy farmers across the country,” Mr. Reed said. “We’re good at efficiently packaging in a white gallon jug, but the business is going elsewhere, so we must innovate.”
Joe Miller, the marketing director at Trickling Springs Creamery, a small dairy in Chambersburg, Pa., said one thing that accelerated his company’s growth in the last four years was a brand face-lift: On its organic ice creams, labels now feature photos from six of the farms where the milk originated. On the success of that campaign, the dairy will unveil a similar redesign for its milk labels this spring.
“Customers want to learn the story behind the food to see if it’s the values they hold,” Mr. Miller said. “The more you open the door for them to see behind the scenes, the more comfortable they feel with your product.”
In the same way that chefs have leveraged television and social media, Mr. Pyykkonen hopes dairy farmers and milk processors can become well-known brands — or at least less anonymous.
“Dairy farmers just haven’t been asked to tell their stories,” he said.
Source: NYTimes
