7 minute read
Ohio Farm Steps Up Bottling in Pandemic Demand
By Ann Hinch
DE GRAFF, Ohio - Taking the plunge into his own creamery was not the first time Ray Jackson gambled with his income. Being a dairy farmer all his life had familiarized him with plenty of risk.
In February 2019, he and his wife, Colleen, launched Indian Creek Creamery on their 180acre De Graff farm, bottling part of their Holstein production one day a week for sale in half-gallon jugs they delivered to Columbus and Cincinnati for small retail stores. They judged they would need to reach selling 1,500 jugs a week to break even.
Ray immersed himself in the new business, resigning from his job as a district sales manager for ABS Global to milk, bottle, market and deliver alongside a fulltime farm employee, a couple seasonal workers and Colleen, when she could take time away from the farm’s bookkeeping and home-schooling. After a year’s work, they were moving only 1,000 jugs each week.
So, they decided to give it another three months – if they couldn’t reach 1,500, he would find another job and sell the tanks and equipment he’d spent years collecting, perhaps even their 25-year-old farm and livestock.
A month later, the 2020-defining COVID-19 started spreading more rapidly in the U.S. and triggered lockdowns – and attendant supply shortages.
While making his delivery one week that March to stores, Ray was greeted like a war hero returning home, bringing in jugs of milk to stock suddenly-empty coolers. Spotting an opportunity, he called Colleen and informed her: “We’re going to bottle more tonight.”
The next week, he sold 2,200 jugs instead of 1,000; the following week, they fell back to just under 1,600, but steadily climbed back to approximately 2,000 a month after that. Where the traditional milk supply chain fell short, the Jacksons were busily hammering in more of their own links. “I felt like a celebrity walking into a store” with deliveries, Ray recalled.
On a recent sunny Saturday morning, he reported bottling 2,700 half-gallons the previous week, saying volume does bob a bit depending on the week and season. For instance, fall/winter holidays demand drops because people don’t stock up on milk while out of town. He still supplies retail grocery, but that’s only about 25-30 percent of his volume; he sells a similar amount through Market Wagon, an Indianapolis-based home-delivery service that branched into nearby Columbus around the time store shortages began, and “just blew up.” The rest are jugs and 2.5-gallon bagged milk sold to coffee shops and restaurants for food prep.
“The pandemic made us,” Ray said, explaining the ramp-up in sales in the past 21 months has allowed Indian Creek Creamery to learn to bottle more, and faster.
SLOW GROWTH
The employees – which now includes an extra full-timer – fill jugs on Mondays using up to three days of stored milk production, as limited by Ohio Department of Agriculture regulations for freshness. Soon they will also bottle on Wednesdays, and Ray just installed another 1,000-gallon tank to mix flavored milk, using a custom chocolate blend Colleen and her brother chose from a Cleveland supplier – he was planning to begin with 300 jugs weekly and
gauge demand for expansion.
Will chocolate be sold only as retail? “Actually, some baristas have told me they’d like to try mixing it in mochas, to get a more chocolatey flavor,” he noted.
Besides the extra employee and extra tank, the Jacksons were able to buy a second delivery truck a year ago. Since he grew slowly to begin, it’s no hardship to be patient now.
Three decades ago he graduated with a degree in dairy science from The Ohio State University, where he met Colleen, a business major. He tried going back to the Cleveland-area dairy farm of his childhood to work, but when he and his father butted heads too often, the young couple decided to seek their fortune west in Urbana, Ohio. In 1991 they rented Colleen’s father’s farm for four years before buying an old farmhouse and land in De Graff.
In the years since, they’ve renovated the house, expanded Oakson South Farm by buying two neighboring properties – including the old orchard where the bottling shed nestles near apple trees – and grown their Holstein herd to 75 cows, 75 heifers, one token Jersey and the occasional bull calf they sell to an Amish neighbor.
Ray said the cows are bred through A.I. and selected for easier pregnancy traits, as well as to be “shorter, wider, tougher,” and fed on pasture as well as non-GMO corn, sorghum, triticale and sudan produced onfarm. He has bred some to give only A2 milk, which he bottles first and labels separately from the farm’s regular whole milk.
This broadens the Jacksons’ sales base, since there are consumers like their eldest daughter, Hillary, a teacher who finds the A2 variety digests better than regular milk.
The milk produced the other four days of the week is sold to Pearl Valley Cheese in Fresno, Ohio, another family-owned operation. Prior to 2019, the Jacksons sold their milk to Reiter Dairy in Columbus, before it was bought out by Dean Foods. At one point Ray sought to try to sell milk to DFADMS, but Oakson didn’t produce enough volume nor did he want an exclusive contract on his production.
So, in 2017 the family minus Hillary (living and working in Georgia) – including Ella and sons Samuel and Luke, both students – voted to venture into bottling. The fact it took almost two more years to get started speaks to how expensive it’s been; Ray said, “We did this on a shoestring, and it was still a quarter-million (dollars)” in capital investment.
The milk is stored in two tanks near the barn and house, then pumped into a tank in the back of a box truck and driven across a narrow county road to the small plant, where its gleaming-white interior houses equipment the Jacksons have scrimped and borrowed to buy over the years. There’s a 1951 piece that HTST-pasteurizes the milk for 17 seconds, rendering it just beyond a
raw state, then rapidly cools the fluid for capping in a 1949 Federal bottler.
Ray does not use a separator, striving to process his milk just enough to meet state health and safety standards in order to preserve its creamy 4.2-percent butterfat state.
LOOKING AHEAD
“When you’re broke, you can’t just call up the bank” for a loan, he pointed out. He credits friends and neighbors for help over the years and in growing the business, as well as suppliers for extending credit when needed.
“People were so good to me,” he added – including his family, who “bought into eating bologna for a lot of years” for Oakson Farm’s growth.
He’s also one middle-aged person who speaks fondly of younger generations. Foodies, especially Millennial customers, like hearing about where their food originates – and he loves expounding on it with his dairy-science background.
Ray would like to keep growing his brand and work with other small-scale farmers, perhaps branching into supplying milk for local artisan dairy products like cheese, yogurt and ice cream – he already has one buyer who makes the latter. And while he’s not opposed to growing, neither does he want to get there through large retailers whose models rely on buying milk cheaply – there’s no reason to be less profitable, after all.
Of the four children, he thinks only Ella might someday be interested in working Indian Creek. She helped with its origins, but has her own career, not to mention a dairy farm and family nearby, including Ray’s and Colleen’s 2-year-old grandson. But Ray’s not expecting her to follow him, and in fact wants each child to find their own path as he did.
“I fear regret more than I fear failure,” he explained. His philosophy is to always try, which he thinks has been easier for him to do with his own farm rather than taking over a family operation and “being the generation that loses it.”
To learn more about Indian Creek Creamery, the farm, the cows and the milk, visit www.indiancreekcreamery.com.
