About UDairy Creamery

YouTube Video Link for Behind the scenes at the UDairy Creamery: youtube.com/watch?v=bh40Kr1eYAE

MISSION

Funded by a grant from the Unidel Foundation and private donations, the UDairy Creamery is a non-profit, student-run entity of the UD College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (CANR). Students receive a hands-on, immersive education in the principles of food science, safety and production, dairy science, business management, entrepreneurship, and sustainable agriculture.

Our Story

The UDairy Creamery, funded by a grant from the UNIDEL foundation and private donations, is intended to communicate to our students about the principles of dairy production, food science and safety, environmentally sound agriculture, business management and finance, and – perhaps most important – how we can sustain agriculture in the face of land use change by incorporating all of these principles into a modern dairy farm.

We began our creamery efforts in the summer of 2008 under the supervison of Dan Severson by forming a CANR Creamery committee consisting of faculty, students, and staff from all academic departments and Cooperative Extension.  In the fall semester, four CANR students (Dan Meany, Matthew Gow, Myra Gemmill, and Caitlin Sheffer) worked as a planning team with Dr. Carl Toensmeyer in the department of Food and Resource Economics and developed a Strategic Marketing Plan that has provided valuable guidance to our planning efforts for the “UDairy” Creamery.

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Ice cream distribution and sales began the fall of 2008, when milk from our dairy cows was shipped to Kilby Cream and made into ice cream. In the winter of 2009, we began to cooperate with Hy-Point Dairy in Wilmington, Delaware, owned by UD alumnus Jay Meany. Hy-Point currently ships the milk from our farm to be made into an ice cream base at Cumberland Farms in Cumberland, New Jersey.  The plain ice cream base is sent back to our Creamery storefront location where it is flavored with our own unique recipes, frozen and packaged by UD student employees in the production area of our Creamery.

CANR broke ground on the UDairy Creamery’s new construction in November of 2010. The UDairy Creamery storefront, on South Campus (next to the Fred Rust Ice Arena), serves as the center for our teaching, research, and extension programs in the area of sustainable agriculture, animal and food sciences, food and resource economics, engineering, environmental science, and entrepreneurship. The storefront is not only for the sale of UD ice cream, but also for other agricultural products such as blankets made with wool from UD sheep and honey from CANR’s apiary.

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Timeline of UDairy Creamery events through the years, textual description below image

UDairy Creamery Timeline Through the Years

2008 - Four interns write a business plan

2010 - Break ground with Unidel Grant

2011 - UDairy Open!

2013 - First University to have an ice cream truck 

2015 - Undergrad course on Science of Ice cream begins

2017 - Receive 2nd grant to build a cheese production and ice cream processing facility

2019 - Open the Genuardi Food Innvoation lab and start making cheese

2021 - Open UDairy Creamery Cafe on Main Street!