Greg Lamp 2016-03-14 09:40:29
Morning Fresh Dairy offers traditional glass bottle home delivery and a special-recipe Greek yogurt.
When Lori and Rob Graves gaze out their Bellvue, Colo., window, they see a stunning view of the snow-capped Colorado Rockies. When they look out another window, they see their fourth-generation dairy operation and the 800 cows that have helped make the business a success on two fronts — a home milk delivery network and a booming yogurt business.
The family-focused business, located about an hour’s drive north of Denver, has a long history in the dairy industry, dating back some 120 years when Rob’s great-grandfather started milking cows in Bellvue’s Pleasant Valley between Rist and Poudre canyons. Back then, they delivered milk in 5-quart pails. Later, the next generation moved to paper cartons, and kept home delivery.
When Lori and Rob took over from his parents Sherry and Robert in the early 1990s, the first thing they did was switch from using milk cartons to glass bottles.
“Bottles not only have that nostalgic quality, but they also make milk taste better,” says Rob. “With bottles, our customers notice the difference in flavor and keep buying from us.”
Glass also is a better insulator than other materials and is nonporous, so bottles can be thoroughly sanitized. On average, each bottle is used 50 times, reducing everyone’s carbon footprint and the environmental resources needed to get farm-fresh milk to customers.
Growing Population
As the Colorado Rocky Mountain Front Range region grew, so did Morning Fresh. Today, the thriving home-delivery business has more than 20 trucks servicing customers in Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland, Windsor, Ault, Severance, Eaton, Berthoud and Wellington. Their claim to fame is freshness: From cow to door, customers receive milk within 24 hours.
The family dairy, operated with children Bryan, Allyx, Trevor, Amber and Kelsey, processes 10,000 half-gallon bottles every day for delivery.
Loving Local
What helps make their business so successful, Rob admits, is that they’re local. That plays well in their region.
“People like it that this valley isn’t full of housing developments,” he says. “We take care of our customers and don’t try to squeeze every dime out of our business.”
Morning Fresh does charge a premium for its milk, “but not that much,” Rob says. “Our prices are often less than at a grocery store.”
Besides bottling traditional white milk in different butterfat ranges — skim, 1 percent, 2 percent, whole, half-and-half and cream — Morning Fresh also offers chocolate milk and a customer favorite, root beer–flavored milk.
“Most people haven’t tried that flavor before,” says Lori. “But if you like root beer, you’ll like it. And if you don’t like root beer, you’re probably going to like it anyway.” They’ve also experimented with blueberry-, strawberry- and banana-flavored milks.
Keeping the dairy thriving takes high-quality feed for the Holstein herd, milked three times a day. “We may even go to milking four times a day for our highest-producing cows,” says Rob.
It’s About the Cows
Rob attributes a big part of the operation’s success to paying close attention to crop production practices on their two farming operations.
The Graveses grow their own corn, wheat and alfalfa, and chop their own silage. Besides 400 acres of grass and 600 acres of corn at the Bellvue dairy, they farm 2,250 irrigated acres at Fort Morgan, Colo., 90 miles east.
The Fort Morgan farm manager works with the CHS location at Yuma, Colo., for all its crop nutrient, seed and crop chemical needs. CHS sales manager Ron Graff, based out of the Wiggins location, provides agronomy advice and handles soil testing and tissue sampling.
“After we soil-sample at the Fort Morgan operation, I sit down with the farm manager to decide what corn hybrids, fertilizer and chemicals we’re going to use,” Graff says.
“We look at all parts of the agronomy equation, from seed selection to the time the crop ends up in the grain or ensilage bin.”
Adding Precision
At the Bellvue farm, the Graveses send soil samples to Graff and they go through the same decision-making process they do with the Fort Morgan farm. “I make the recommendations and they take it from there,” he says.
This year, the Fort Morgan farm will enter part of its fields in CHS YieldPoint®, a precision agriculture program developed by CHS and directed by agronomic specialists. The specialists assist farmers with soil sampling and analysis, mapping and prescription writing, variable-rate application recommendations, record keeping, and farm planning.
“The Fort Morgan farm has seven soil types and variable topography, perfect for CHS YieldPoint,” Graff says.
As Rob Graves puts it, “As long as the 130 acres in the program make us more efficient, I’m all for it.”
Make Room for Noosa
When two Australian brothers came knocking six years ago — wanting to partner with Morning Fresh Dairy to produce a specialty yogurt — Lori and Rob Graves were all ears. The fact that Lori already was an avid yogurt consumer didn’t hurt.
As an established dairy tuned in to the consumer market with home delivery, Morning Fresh Dairy was exactly what the Australian group was looking for.
The partnership was off and running. With co-founder Koel Thomae, the Graveses began by making a few 100-gallon batches of their own version of Noosa yoghurt, a honey-based yogurt that was similar but not the same as their Australian partner’s product. Adding honey gives the yogurt a creamy texture and more subtle flavor than traditional Greek yogurt, which often has a chalky taste experience.
Their rather makeshift yogurt plant has been replaced by a hightech production facility only a stone’s throw from the dairy’s rotary milking parlor. The process for finished Noosa yoghurt, fresh from the cow to a container, takes just 24 to 36 hours with the plant running around the clock.
“Now we’re producing 1 million pounds of Noosa yoghurt a week,” says Rob.
About 25 percent of the milk needed to produce Noosa yoghurt comes from Morning Fresh Dairy’s 800 cows. The rest arrives in bulk from Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) marketing cooperative, from dairy farms where cows are treated and fed rations much like those found at Morning Fresh.
“Yogurt production outgrew what we could produce here,” says Rob. “We’d need 2,800 cows to meet the current needs of Noosa yoghurt.” The entire business employs more than 100 people.
He says they’re able to meet the demands of the burgeoning market and have designed their yogurt-making facilities with expansion in mind. And that expansion will likely continue if the past is any indicator of the future.
Besides selling 24-, 8- and new 4-ounce containers through their home delivery business, the Graveses sell Noosa yoghurt through dairy cases at Target, Kings Soopers, Whole Foods, Kroger, Safeway, Publix, Costco, Sam’s Club and Walmart stores across the U.S.
Noosa yoghurt, a brand that is just 6 years old, produces 16 different fruit-on-the-bottom flavors and is sold in major food markets throughout the U.S., says Rob Graves, Bellvue, Colo.
“Morning Fresh has grown to 7,000 home-delivery customers with just word-of-mouth advertising.”
— Lori Graves
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