Ninety percent of the time, we stock the shelves ourselves. If there is a quality issue, we know where to look. "We have two trucks, and we keep the ice cream at -15 to -20✯. "One of our early decisions was to deliver everything ourselves," he continues. But, Southern Craft Creamery's buyers all had one thing in common - they are all locally owned.ĭale says this is important because "then the owner can take an interest in us, and we can take an interest in them. The scoop shops, grocery stores and restaurants that carry their ice cream range from down-home to upscale. With the coffee-supplier's customer list in hand, the Eades soon had pints, quarts and 5-liter pans delivered up and down famed Florida Scenic Highway 30A. The couple took over management of the dairy, freeing up Dale and Cindy to grow the ice cream business. in beef cattle nutrition and reproduction. Enter daughter Meghan, a veterinarian, and her husband, Brad Austin, a Ph.D. The value-added business brought new streams of income to the farm but also a lot of work. After about eight months, even Lauren and Zach, who the Eades describe as perfectionists, felt the ice cream was right and ready to sell. The family continued to refine and test its ice cream recipe. Lauren and Zach were visiting a coffee roaster in Panama City when the owner, so impressed with their mission, gave them his customer list. It was on a flavor-hunting trip that the family got a real break for their Southern Craft Creamery. They insisted on making their own base rather than buying it using real, locally sourced flavors. We call it buttering out."ĭale jokes, "We had really tasty butter for six months." They stuck with their plan though. "If there is too much fat, or you freeze it wrong, it is greasy. "With nonhomogenized milk, the fat levels are usually pretty high," says Robert Roberts, professor of food science at PSU. That's the "old-fashioned milk" where the cream literally rises to the top.īut, it comes with challenges. Their plan was to make ice cream with nonhomogenized milk. "They thought we were crazy," she recalls of the instructors' reaction to their business idea. When Zach had to back out at the last minute from the PSU course, Cindy went with Lauren. Their instructors were hardly encouraging. They enrolled in the University of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania State University (PSU) ice cream short courses. The O'Bryans started their research and development of an ice cream business in a converted peanut warehouse. "That night, they were the ones who didn't sleep," he laughs. The next day, they asked Lauren and her husband, Zach O'Bryan, if they wanted to move to Florida and help the family start an ice cream business. He was having trouble sourcing local milk, so she asked her parents if they could help. She met an entrepreneur in Atlanta who made and sold ice cream. In 2010, the Eades were visiting daughter Lauren in Georgia when she told them about a food show she attended as part of her job as a wine salesman. "We couldn't tell them where to buy Cindale Dairy milk, but this (ice cream business) has always been in the back of our minds," he says. But, until they started selling ice cream directly to the public, all the milk they produced was being sold on the commodity market. They started Cindale Dairy, out of Marianna, Florida, in 1994.ĭale says early on, people in the community would ask where they could buy Cindale Dairy milk. The Pensacola natives met in high school, dated throughout college and married after graduation. With a 300-cow Jersey, Jersey-Holstein dairy, the Eades were fighting an uphill battle in the commodity milk market. "We've had children, and even adults, tell us they had no idea how milk was produced before they toured the farm," Dale's wife, Cindy, says. "We wanted that personal interaction," he adds. It's a message that goes down a lot easier with a scoop of ice cream. "We were pulled toward a value-added product so we could talk to consumers about where food comes from," Dale Eade says. It wasn't all about markets, however, for the Eade family. Eat dessert first." That's a pretty good theme for Southern Craft Creamery, where longtime dairy producers took the plunge into one of the tastiest, albeit difficult, ways to add value to their homegrown commodity - gourmet ice cream. The Eade family decided to add value to their commodity milk with a gourmet ice cream shop, Southern Craft Creamery.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |