Tillamook Cheese is 107 years long journey

Tillamook  facility

Tillamook welcome the visitors

Observation Deck at second floor

The entire process is automated but human judgement still prevails

Getting ready for free sample testing ritual 

When you say Amul in India it evokes image of milk.This is the power of brand Amul. Its story began from a small non descriptive area Anand in Gujrat as a co-operative society of milk producing farmers some 50 years back. Despite  becoming a pan India brand, it is still run by co-operative federation. Tillamook brand in America has a very similar story, when you say Tillamook in America, it means quality cheese .

 The brand is owned by co-operative society of milk producing farmers in Tillamook county on Pacific coast. The journey of Tillamook brand started almost 107 years back when groups of European migrants especially from Holland and Switzerland arrived in this area. Area having population of 4700 people but the population of cows is manifold.

We are using Tillamook brand cheese from last 10 years during our visit to US and had curiosity to understand the story behind the brand so we decided to visit Tillamook county.

The Tillamook county  is on the northern coast of Oregon around  70 miles west of Oregon State's capital city Portland. It is spread close to Tillamook Bay. Nature has bestowed its bounty to the area,  featuring some of the most breathtaking scenery, activities and attractions.

We drove from Seattle around 4th July and it took us six hours,once we arrived simply fell in love with the area. It is home to more than a dozen mapped and maintained hiking trails,  miles of navigable waters for the kayak enthusiast and not to forget the crabbing, clamming and fishing that takes place in the Tillamook  Bay area. It is also home to the famous Three Capes Scenic Loop. While approaching the place, we did find breathtaking views of the ocean, the Three Arch Rocks, Netarts Bay and Haystack Rock in Pacific City.

How it began

Under territorial and federal land-claim acts , white farmers took possession of large tracts of land around the lower banks of the coastal rivers and their estuaries in Oregon. Dairying, the earliest and most important farming enterprise  was well established by 1845. Dairy farmers diked and drained the marshy tide flats around the bay area to grow hay and make pasture for their cows. The drained wetlands was good hay-growing land; one settler reported a yield of six tons per acre from his diked tide flats, better than the expected three to five tons. The cows arrived in Tillamook soon after Euro-American settlement there, driven in from Clatsop County by Henry W. Wilson, after whom the Wilson River was named.

The migrants, who settled here, were basically from cheese-producing nations of Holland and Switzerland and began to raise dairy cows. There were few passable roads over the mountains, and reaching Portland markets proved difficult. After several failed attempts at hiring reliable ocean transport, residents scraped together enough timber and hardware from local shipwrecks to build a small schooner in 1855, which they christened 'Morning Star'. For several years, they used the ship to carry butter to markets in Astoria and Portland. The Morning Star is memorialized today as part of the Tillamook Cheese logo, and a replica is on view at the Tillamook factory. 

The family dairy farms, roughly 110 in numbers,  in the area, are a member of the Tillamook County Creamery Association, which dairy farmers established in 1909. This was to ensure the uniformity and highest quality of cheese. 

 Settlers in the Tillamook Valley experimented with cheese making as definitely the shelf life of cheese is much longer than butter. It was in the year 1889 that Merriman Folen and Bob Richards made the first attempt at commercial cheese production. The result was inedible. But they continued experimenting and within a few years they had developed a small but successful cheese-making operation. 

Cheese-making was only a minor part of Tillamook County’s dairy industry until 1894, when cheesemakers Harry Ogden and T.S. Townsend induced Canadian immigrant Peter McIntosh to settle in Tillamook County. McIntosh had learned the art of cheese-making in his home province of Ontario. While most dairy farmers in Tillamook County focused on butter production, but it was McIntosh who convinced them that the isolation of the valley made cheese a more viable product, as it withstood transportation delays better than butter.

McIntosh told reporter Dean Collins in the early 1930s: “You could store your cheese and wait for the boat without any danger of losing out through your product spoiling, as butter might spoil—for remember there weren’t the cold storage facilities in those days that there are now.” 

McIntosh’s cheese-making methods proved to be the catalyst for Tillamook’s cheese industry. By the turn of the century there were over three dozen cheese factories operating in Tillamook County. In 1909 ten of the factories joined together in a co-operative association in order to establish a standard based on McIntosh’s method of producing cheddar cheese. By 1915 the association had grown to twenty-five factories that agreed to consolidate buying and selling under a single authority. The improvement of roads during this period further facilitated consolidation. 

In 1918 the Tillamook County Creamery Association began advertising nationally, which led to a notable expansion of demand for their product. By the early 1930s the association was selling more than 7 million pounds of their award-winning cheese throughout the western United States and Alaska.

 Patrick Criteser is currently the  president and CEO of Tillamook County Creamery Association and Tillamook Cheese. He  traces his ancestry in Oregon back seven generations. Although his ancestors settled in the Willamette Valley, Criteser said he took the Tillamook job nearly four years ago because he wanted to work in his home state, Oregon. He had worked with brands including Nike, Disney and Proctor & Gamble and, more recently, as CEO at Coffee Bean International. 

By the way Criteser is the eighth CEO of the 107-year-old farmer-owned Tillamook County Creamery Association.

The association is one of the Northwest’s largest dairy cooperatives, but unlike many others, Tillamook develops and distributes branded consumer products from almost all of the milk it gets from its Tillamook County owners.

Those products are marketed under the Tillamook brand, and  sold across America, although some non-branded milk byproducts such as powdered whey and lactose are sold internationally.

Criteser joined the company during a volatile period in the milk prices, from highs in 2014 to recent lows. Added to market, environmental and political challenges are those of running an operation that purchases milk from its 97 dairy owners, then manufactures, distributes and promotes Tillamook dairy products to make a profit for its owners.

When market prices for milk are low, the challenge is to increase profits for farmer-owners at the sales end. When prices for milk are high, the challenge is to increase sales or reduce other costs to maintain profits. According to Criteser, Tillamook’s revenues have grown by about 45 percent in the past four years, with profit growth exceeding that pace. The expanded earnings have come with expanded employment, up from about 650 four years ago to 850 this year in Tillamook and in Boardman.

In 2014, the company completed a 64,000-square-foot expansion at its production facility in Boardman allowing it to increase whey processing — a $95 million investment.

People across USA have craze to know more about the brand Tillamook. Every day fans visit the factory and surrounding area, last year more than 1.3 million people visited the Tillamook Cheese factory. It has observation deck with glass panels from there the visitors see operations right from making curd to packing the final product. The visitors also get an opportunity to taste free samples of variety of cheese on the second floor.

On first floor there is a large area serving factory made ice- cream in freshly baked cones. Their cafeteria serve delicacies using fresh ingredients and of-course the in-house cheese.

Tillamook's present focus is on spread the power of the Tillamook brand beyond its cheeses to its other products - ice cream, butter, sour cream, yogurt. Already, products are made with fewer artificial ingredients — notice the mint chocolate chip isn’t green anymore? — and new products, including Greek yogurts and ice cream bars are seeing success. In a country where monopoly and oligopoly is the order of day, success of co-operative federation of dairy farmers is a big thing, this is the power behind brand Tillamook.