To close off the series on our recent visit to Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, I wanted to include a snippet of some of the dialogue between Ronny Osofsky, owner of Ronnybrook Dairy, and Amanda Trzcinski, the operations management intern.

The preceding articles in our Ronnybrook series have incorporated the three hour conversation and tour.  Now, I am highlighting specific questions (that you may have yourselves) and their answers.

Q:  Where do you get your fruit [for your yogurts]?

Ronnybrook Farm Dairy (Ronny Osofsky and Amanda Trzcinski):

Fruit Crown, out of Long Island.  It’s fresh fruit, just pureed; it’s not canned or frozen. A lot of people will pick up one of our drinkable yogurts or cup yogurts and not buy it because it has a lot of sugar.  [What they don’t realize is] that’s not processed sugar; it’s natural sugar from the fruit.  Sometimes there is a misconception like “oh I can’t give this to my kid; it has 27 grams of sugar in it”.  Well if you eat a peach, what’s the sugar content of that peach?

Q:  How does the fruit get to Ronnybrook?

RFD:  The fruit comes weekly.  Our drivers pick up the fruit on the way back on Fridays to decrease shipping costs.  We try to make it that our trucks are always coming back with something on them, be it bottle returns or fruit or boxes or plastic bottles.  We get a pallet or two of fruit a week, depending on the season.  In the summer we do more.

Q:  What’s your most popular of the drinkable yogurts?

A.T.: As far as sales go, blackberry, peach, mango are tied for top, with strawberry following.

R.O.:  Those were the first ones we made [blackberry, peach, and mango]. A lot of stores don’t have shelf room and don’t order the other flavors [blueberry pomegranate, banana, honey vanilla, plain, low fat flavors].

A.T. For cup yogurt, we sell more plain than anything else.

R.O.  We haven’t phased out any of the flavors.  I just think we have to give them time.  We don’t do the coffee milk in quarts/pints anymore. Now [we only sell them] in plastic—people love it but not enough people buy it.

Q:  Do you have the same schedule every day?

RFD:  We do chocolate milk at the end of the day—because of pipes, the chocolate powder gets everywhere.   We bottle milk 2 days a week; we bottle yogurt 3 days a week; we use Tuesday for maintenance/inventory.

Q: How do you determine when you’re done bottling for the day?

RFD: When we’ve met our production for the day:  we have a certain number of cases and gallons we have to do based on customer order.  The Greenmarket is always an estimate, but we have a good estimate depending on the weather.  Snow doesn’t effect [our estimate], but rain does.

Q: Distribution must take a ton of work!

RFD: [Distribution is] A huge part of the operation.  A lot of people don’t do their own distribution, but we do.  We do have some distributors, but we do a huge bulk of it on our own.

We deliver to New York City almost every day, with two big deliveries a week that are just milk.  We deliver two days at the Greenmarkets, [then there are] local deliveries and distributors on one day.  Our trucks are on the road pretty much every day.

Q: If you do your major deliveries twice a week to New York City, how do you store for the Greenmarket?

RFD: Everything is stored at the Chelsea Market store; [the products are] picked up at Chelsea and then delivered from there.  Our biggest markets are Union Square and the U.N., so we send separate trucks for those.

Q: What is the percentage of bottles returned?

RFD: About 50%; at the Greenmarkets [the percentage is] more.  Some people still don’t know to return the bottles and so they pay the fee.  Also, a lot of the retailers don’t mention the bottle returning.

Q: Are there customers who don’t buy your milk because it’s in glass?

RFD: Many reasons:  sometimes they don’t want the hassle of bringing the bottle back; its weight, [it comes in] smaller quantities.  Also, certain stores won’t take our milk because they don’t want to deal with returns, store the empty bottles, or pay deposits back to people.

Q: Tell me more about the mattresses the cows sleep on.

RFD: The mattresses are made of recycled rubber, which is very common.  We were one of the first dairies to market them, but a lot of the farms use mattresses.  Ours are made out of recycled tires; some farms even have waterbeds!

Q: When do the calves get names?

RFD: [When they’re first born], they have their mother’s name put on.  Then they are named when they come into the barn.  They’re in cow families.  Once you have 80 cows, it’s hard to come up with names, especially when you have 40 ‘Barbies’:  Barbie [the cow] had 40 offspring.  We ran out of ‘B’s!

Q: What is the difference between unhomogenized and homogenized milk?

RFD: It’s healthier not to homogenize and it tastes different.  We have lots of people who drink our milk, thinking they’re lactose intolerant but they’re not.  Often it’s the processing that makes them allergic.  When it’s homogenized, it goes directly into your blood stream.  When it’s unhomogenized, the milk fat is naturally larger globules.  [These] get absorbed later into your small and large intestine, which is where it’s supposed to be digested.  It’s then digested more slowly and you don’t get that flush of milk fat that immediately needs to be digested [from homogenized milk].

Q: Do your customers get homogenization and pasteurization confused?

RFD: A lot of the stores were thinking their milk was going bad because all of the cream was rising to the top.  I can explain if people ask, but some people just stop buying.  [The milk] can last quite some time as long as it’s cold.

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-Meaghin

Ronnybrook Farm Dairy is an average sized New York dairy farm (100 cows) that connects with its customers, both commercial and individual, through transparency, consistency, and creativity.  They’ve been selling at the Greenmarket since July 4, 1991, and are continually experimenting with new flavors and products (be on the lookout for Greek yogurt at the Greenmarket!), as well as searching for ways to lessen their environmental impact.

Ronnybrook re-uses their glass milk bottles, which are made with such thick glass that only one glassmaker in the entire North American continent can make them!  Ronnybrook even designed their plastic bottles to be a number 1 plastic to make them easily recyclable — most milk bottles are 4s or 5s.

As someone who returns my milk bottle back to the stand, I’ve often wondered what happens to the bottle after it leaves my hands.  Ronnybrook’s delivery trucks do double duty — bringing full bottles of milk into the city and returning empties to Ancramdale, NY. Here, the used empties are loaded with new bottles into the bottle washer. The machine holds 16 cases of bottles at a time, giving the bottles a chemical bath, a rinse, and then a final sanitation.  The bottles are then immediately sent down the conveyor belt to be refilled.  If any bottles are left unfilled at the end of production, they must be rewashed the next day.

Ronnybrook’s daily production puts my most productive day to shame.  The entire walk-in cooler (much larger than most of New York City apartments) was completely filled with milk that had been made that day: skim, low fat, whole, heavy cream, half and half, and chocolate, all in a variety of sizes and containers, including a few I hadn’t seen before:

•    Half gallon plastic bottles: Next time you see a Fresh Direct truck driving through your neighborhood, take a closer look.  Many of the trucks’ sides show a glass bottle of Ronnybrook Milk.  In reality, there isn’t a matching glass bottle inside the truck:  Fresh Direct only takes these half gallon plastic containers.

•    Menden Creamery Butter:  I’ve seen this butter in grocery stores like Fairway, without knowing that it’s actually Ronnybrook butter under a private label!  Menden Creamery was started by a woman from Massachusetts who originally learned how to make butter at Ronnybrook’s facilities.  She then took her newfound skills back to Massachusetts and made butter for 5 years.  When she moved, she asked Ronnybrook if they wanted to take over her business but maintain the separate label.

Coming up Next: 

Your common questions answered, including what percentage of milk bottles actually get returned…and all about their infamous cow mattresses!

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Throughout their expansion and switch to direct sales, the Osofsky family has been guided by several beliefs: a commitment to family, a focus on quality ingredients, and respect for their animals and land.  Currently, five of Ronny’s family members work at the farm.

Ronnybrook offers support to other local dairies, including Milk Thistle and the Hudson Valley Fresh Co-op; both dairies have used Ronnybrook’s bottling facilities at different periods in their operations.  Ronnybrook recognizes that while there is a level of competition among the local New York dairies, it’s “friendly, not malicious”.
 
At Ronnybrook, nothing is black and white (except the cows, of course!).  There is a balance of grazing and barn time, especially in the dead of winter.   The farm remains upfront about their choice not to pursue an organic label for their dairy products.  As it states on their website, and as my tour of the facilities indicated, they consider themselves “beyond organic”.  

Ronnybrook doesn’t need the label to indicate that their cows are treated with love and respect; the evidence is present in their products and transparency.  Their decision not to pursue an organic label stems from the fact that if a cow becomes sick, the staff at Ronnybrook will choose to treat that cow with antibiotics (as they would one of their children).  An organic label prohibits any form of antibiotics, even when justified or necessary.

As New Yorkers, we have the chance to buy locally and talk to the people who grew or made the products we buy.  A label can make consumers feel safer, certainly, but the reality of Ronnybrook is that their animals and their practices are top of the line and in tune with nature.  They grow all of their own hay and forage crops for supplemental feed.  (The hay was wet and potent: “as close to grass as you can get”, testified Ronny).  

Ronnybrook’s cows are recognized for their individual characteristics:  each cow has a unique name (some of which are very creative), and the farmers supply varying amounts of feeds depending on the cow.  Real pride emanates from Ronny when he points out Corrinna, his prize milker — producing 150 pounds of milk a day for the last 5 months!

Ronny shared that a few years back, they led a focus group and people who would never even “look at anything but organic switched to Ronnybrook when we did the pros and cons”.
 
When I asked Ronny if he thought his parents ever envisioned the current success of Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, he stated that they were both alive when Ronnybrook switched to direct sales in 1991.
 
 
Coming up Next: 

What happens to your milk bottles when you return them?  What’s Ronnybrook’s most popular yogurt flavor?   …and other questions answered!

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Ronnybrook Farm Dairy: the name Ronnybrook is eponymous with fresh, small batch, local milk, both in the New York region and throughout the country.

Their name precedes them, as even before I moved to New York, I had read of Ronnybrook products in various food articles and books.  Encompassing 650 acres of beautiful Hudson Valleyland, Ronnybrook has served as a family dairy farm since 1941, first as a local co-op, and since 1991 as a direct-seller operation under the management of Ronny Osofsky and his brothers.

In the nearly 20 years since the farm’s transformation, Ronnybrook has steadily expanded their Greenmarket locations and grown their now large network of shops, restaurants, and cafes to which they source their dairy products.   Throughout their growth, the Osofsky family has maintained a clear and consistent set of practices for animal welfare and product quality.

Ronnybrook Farm Dairy also serves as a mentor for other local dairies seeking advice and guidance about best practices and navigating the market.  In fact, several other local dairies, such as Milk Thistle and Hudson Valley Fresh, have used Ronnybrook’s facilities to bottle their own milk.

In an effort to learn more about such an inspiring farm, I recently drove up to bucolic Ancramdale, NY to visit with Ronny Osofsky and his Operations Management intern, Amanda Trzcinski.

Ronny, Amanda, and the other workers whom I met graciously led me around the farm, demonstrating their wit, charm, and surprisingly laid-back personalities. In addition to my nearly 3 hour tour and conversation, Amanda drove me to a hilltop meadow for a distant view of the farm and surrounding mountains.

Life at Ronnybrook is busy and constantly evolving.  Creativity and flexibility are a must!

During my tour and interview, both Ronny and Amanda alternated between dealing with other workers, delivery logistics, and distribution questions. I toured a large yogurt bottling facility addition that has been five years in the making (they’re nearly done now).  Ronnybrook is exploring the idea of sourcing to grocery stores outside of New York, but their facility has to expand even further to handle that kind of volume.

Ronny shared that most of their equipment is purchased used and then reconditioned, a process that is both time consuming and tedious.

Ronnybrook is experimenting with products that they carry at their own Farm Store:  they currently sell a variety of milk bottles, bottle holders, t-shirts, keychains, and even onesies.  In addition, Ronny might add vegetables and meat from several of their neighboring farms.

Amanda, the operations intern, has been at Ronnybrook for about 9 months, having majored in Animal Science and Agribusiness at Cornell.  She grew up on a dairy farm in New York, but hasn’t been able to find time to go home yet to help out on her family’s farm because of the constant level of activity at Ronnybrook.

In 2008, Ronnybrook was awarded an energy efficiency grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Ronnybrook used this money for a solar water heating system to preheat water for processing milk.

Coming up next

Learn about Ronnybrook’s take on ‘organic’ and how much milk comes from their highest producing cow each day (hint: over 100 pounds!)

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