Creamery construction finishing soon with plans for cheeses – Franklin News Post

If you look under the new construction at Homestead Creamery, you can find its original factory plant still in full operation.

When Homestead Creamery started planning to make an expansion two years ago, it didnt want to move. It wanted to triple the size of its current plant, but didnt want to stop operation for the construction, said Mike Grisetti, Homestead Creamerys president.

Thus, they developed the idea to construct the new building directly over and around the old one. Once the new building is finished, they will tear down the exterior walls of the original plant and begin rearranging existing equipment and adding new pieces little by little.

Most people couldnt understand what we wanted to do, Grisetti laughed. We had a lot of obstacles doing what we wanted to do: build over the top to keep production going.

They looked at other options, including moving somewhere else, too, but we like the area, he said. It operates off more than 50 acres in Burnt Chimney on Booker T. Washington Highway.

Construction started about a year and a half ago and should be finished in about two months, he said.

The first thing they had to do was grade the land and put a parking lot where a hill and ditch used to be. The lot can hold 35 tractor-trailers, and they knew theyd need to use it during construction, he said.

Then they built the wastewater system, handled by RF WasteWater in Blacksburg. The system is designed to be totally green, Grisetti said.

The fats in milk are tough to deal with, he said. The new system isolates them, and injects lime and fertilizer into waste before using the resulting end-product on the fields as fertilizer.

Inside its current plant, milk is bottled and ice cream is made. Steel beams and studs rise up and around it. The roof is already up, and the concrete floor is set.

Only part of the building will be in two stories, an area divided into rooms on the front and right side of the building. Most of it will be the plant.

The main entry will not face the road but rather the companys Farm Market, Grisetti said. To the left of the main door will be a stairway, with cow designs cut into the steps, and an elevator.

Upstairs will be a board room, a training center that would fit 150 people, bathrooms and a display of dairy-industry antiques the company has collected. From a mezzanine people will be able to look over the plant on one side and see the beautiful view of the mountains out the windows on the other, he said.

Downstairs, below the second-story rooms and mezzanine, will be a storage area, laboratories, offices and bathrooms.

A third silo, which would hold 15,000 pounds of milk, will be added. For now, the company has two, one with 10,000 pound capacity and the other at 15,000 pounds.

Additions are coming to the ice cream department, as well. In two weeks, the company will receive a machine that can fill ice cream into 4-ounce and 8-ounce cups at the rate of 120 per minute.

The company already has begun using its new bottle washer. It was able to wash 144 bottles at a time, but six weeks ago, the creamery started using the machine that washes 900 bottles at once. Cleaned and sanitized bottles leave the machine on a conveyor belt which takes them into the milk-bottling area.

The company produces 200,000 pounds of milk in four days, he said.

Currently, the company uses milk from 400 cows, Grisetti said. Once the companys expansion is complete, this place should be able to grow 20 times.

Its not going to do so immediately, he added. We need to make a couple of equipment changes to start with.

The company now gets milk from four farms, and we calculated that in the next five years, we would take on three or four new farms. Thats not anywhere near capacity of what their expansion eventually would allow them to do, Grisetti said.

Homestead Creamery was started in 2001. It had a lot of years of struggle before evening out. Grisetti bought into the company in 2005 after a career as part-owner of Nationwide Homes in Martinsville.

Cheese

With the extra floor space in the plant, the company will begin making cheese, Grisetti said, which it has not done before.

They havent decided yet which types of cheese theyll make, but they will include some aged and some quick cheese.

Making cheese would allow the company to utilize the product. By aging the cheese, it allows you to spread out the life of it. Cows produce more milk in winter, he said right at the time of the year people consume less milk and ice cream. By making cheese, that extra milk they produce wont go to waste.

Milkman deliveries

Also with Homestead Creamery, the home delivery service is expanding. It has added routes in Lynchburg and Forest and is really taking off, Grisetti said. The company had been making deliveries to Roanoke and Salem since 2006.

The milkman goes right up to the door, Grisetti said. Each customer has a box into which the milkman leaves the orders. More than just milk, they also leave eggs, bread, meats, frozen foods, vegetables, cheese, jams and other food, all grown or produced locally or within Virginia.

Weve really grown to be a mobile food store, Grisetti said.

Their milkmen are recognized in three levels, Grisetti said. A milkman is in training for one year. After three years, a milkman carries the title senior milkman; and after five years, he is a premier milkman. So far, theres only one premier milkman.

If having milkmen seems old fashioned, so might the fact that a website only recently is being developed. Two of the nine owners are of a religion that prohibits internet use, and they had been the most recent presidents of Homestead Creamery, Grisetti said. Now that he is the companys president, he is having a website created.

Meanwhile, Homestead Creamery gets the word out to its customers and fans through a Facebook page one of the employees handles, he said.

The store is a lot of fun, he said, serving as a social center as well as a shop. It holds regular events, such as bingo games every couple of weeks. It holds ice-cream eating contests, a big St. Patricks Day event and, in the spring, Sundaes on Mondays. It recently held an ice cream breakfast.

Theres always something going on, he added.

How its made

At 6 a.m., two tankers deliver milk from four farms to Homestead Creamery, where it is pumped into two silos. The plants employees are already there and waiting they arrived at 4 a.m. to begin the process of preparing the milk for bottling, and to make ice cream.

The company, located in Burnt Chimney, produces 200,000 pounds of milk in four days, said Mike Grisetti, Homestead Creamerys president. The company can make 4,000 quarts of ice cream a day, he added.

Homestead Creamery packages its milk in returnable glass bottles; customers receive a $2 deposit back when they return them. Nine hundred bottles are washed at a time a vast improvement begun six weeks ago over the previous system that washed 144 bottles at a time.

Everything tastes better in glass bottles, Grisetti said, adding that they are free of lingering aftertastes plastics have, which affect the flavor of milk and other products. Homestead Creamery uses only glass bottles, and we have no intention of changing that.

One silo that holds the newly arrived milk holds 15,000 pounds of milk and the other holds 10,000 pounds worth. The movement of milk through the silos is managed by controls in a room about the size of a long home hallway.

In its natural state, the milk and cream are separated. You dont see the layer of cream on top of milk in modern grocery-store milk, because it is homogenized stirred so thoroughly it wont separate.

The separator separates cream from milk at the rate of 30,000 pounds of milk in less than three hours. It beats the milk with 1,000 pounds of pressure.

In the case of milk which has had some cream removed, such as 2 percent milk, Vitamins B and D are added to the milk, Grisetti said.

Homestead Creamery sells homogenized milk and it also sells non-homogenized milk, which was the norm in years past. Their labeling on that is premium.

Next to the homogenizer is the pasteurizer, which quickly heats milk to destroy bacteria. Milk comes in at 36 degrees Fahrenheit, Grisetti said. It is run through the pasteurizer, where it is heated to 165 degrees for 23 seconds, then immediately brought down to 34 to 36 degrees. That quick chilling locks in flavor.

Bottles come into the bottling room from the washroom along a conveyor belt which crosses the wall in a small opening. The conveyor belt swirls around a bottle-filling machine. The bottles are filled, then pass a stamper which sprays the expiration date onto the lids. They move down to two or three packers who inspect each bottle, then put in into a section of a crate.

The company has been filling 1,100 bottles an hour but has the ability to bottle 2,500 bottles of milk an hour. Weve built in a lot of capacity to have room to grow, Grisetti said.

Beyond the bottling room is a bagging room. Milk for colleges, and some of the milk for Franklin County High School, is bagged, Grisetti said. The bagger can package 9,600 pounds of milk in an hour.

Also off the milk section is the ice cream room. It has two 300-gallon tanks to hold cream, and two 45-quart mixers to mix the ice cream. The ice cream is made in batches, one flavor at a time. Thats different from larger operations, which pump in ingredients on one continuous feed, all fully operated, Grisetti said.

On a recent morning there, the ice cream base poured into the mixers through a spout in a tank above, while a woman measured chocolate chips and coffee syrup and poured them in. When the ice cream was finished, she opened a door at the bottom of the mixing tank to let it into a large bowl.

She carried the large bowl onto a worktable, where another woman helped her fill the quart packages, one large scoopful at a time. They capped the packages and rolled them into the freezer.

Homestead Creamery ice cream is composed of 17 percent cream and 20 to 23 percent overrun another way of saying air. Common ice cream is made with 100 percent overrun, Grisetti said.

Milk comes to the creamery from 400 cows on four farms, two owned by the company and two which supply milk through contract. The suppliers must fulfill a long list of requirements, Grisetti said. That includes healthy care for the animals and how their bedding is kept. It also requires farmers to give the cows constant access to pastures.

Were all-natural milk, Grisetti said. The only difference between us and organic is being certified plus the fact that Homestead Creamery sprays the corn it uses for feed. However, he said, samples are always taken, and never has any spray residue shown up in the feed.

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Creamery construction finishing soon with plans for cheeses - Franklin News Post