D2—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, July 3,1982 Green’s Dairy BY JOYCE BUPP Staff Correspondent YORK With a high-pitched screech, a hydraulic lever trips and thick liquid gushes from a row of spouts, filling empty popsicle shaped metal molds with die sweet chocolatey goodness of fudgesicle mix. Two minutes farther down the vitaline ice cream novelty production machine, the treats are already setting up in the freezing brine and another mechanical process inserts sticks into the popsicles. And in just another minute or two, the rows of popsicles with their marching sticks, jutting up from the now frozen solid treats, flip off the slowly moving line and into a mechanical wrapping machine. Moments later, they’re packed, again automatically, into attractive colorful boxes, and disappear down a belt toward the freezer warehouse and sweet-tooth ice cream lovers across the country. This production line of mouth watering frozen treats continues, round the clock, six days a week, at Green’s Dairy, 201 North Highland Ave. York. These dozens of novelty ice cream treats rolling off the automatic production line each minute are a far cry from the horse-drawn wagon that clip clopped through the streets of York bade in 1913, when company founder Clarence Green put himself in the dairy business. With the purchase of a horse, wagon, spigot-type milk can and milk from local farmers. Green sold door-to-door, filling a housewife’s milk order with bottles her neighbors had just returned, washed and ready to be refilled, at the previous stop. From Clarence Green’s initial investment, operating out of a stable on nearby Stanton Street, the West York dairy has grown into a multi-million dollar corporate business, with a sales projection of $3O million and a capital budget of $BOO,OOO for 1982. Along the way, they’ve acquired 13 other milk and ice cream companies in the marketing region. “But Green’s has never owned a cow,” smiles Abby Green Little, marketing manager and part of the third-generation to handle the reins of the dairy firm. Her brother, James B. Green, is general manager, while their father, James 0. Green, son of the founder, is president of the cor poration. Popsicles anyone? Dozens of the dessert minutes after the thick ice cream mix fills the favorites, as well as a variety of other frozen metal molds, the frozen, stick-inserted, snack items, flip off the automated production wrapped and packaged finished product is equipment each minute. Approximately five ready for warehousing or sale. Quality has always been a watchword for Green’s, and in his early years of business, Clarence Green invested in the first milk pasturizer to be used in the York area. Customers, pleased with the products, grew in numbers, and soon the little stable had been outgrown as a base for business. In 1924, at the Highland Avenue site, Green built a modem, refrigerated processing facility. It was the first of many constructions that would eventually expand the dairy to the limits of their property. James 0. Green, the current president, joined his dad in the family business in 1947 and the legal structure of the firm was changed to a corporation. Dairy marketing centered on fluid milk products, primariy sold through home delivery routes. At the peak of the home-delivery boom. Green’s ran some 85 separate routes through the York area, serving 5,000 customers. But by the early 60's, Green saw the initial signs of what would become a decline in fluid milk sales that would continue unabated through the next two decades. Some dairies, responding to the needs of new marketing ideas, chose the convenience store route. Green’s had opened the first convenience store in York, and still maintain the sales outlet and dairy bar restaurant on their street-level floor. But after long and intense corporate soul-searching, they chose instead to invest their capital and, energies into the manufacture of ice cream and related novelty treat products. To say that decision was a successful one would be un derstating the fact. Green’s is now the largest specialty-item producer on the East Coast, and a large-volume supplier of ice cream products in 13 states across the mid-Atlantic and into New England. Their 500 wholesale customers of ice cream, ice cream mixes and frozen novelties include restaurant chains such as Dairy Queen, numerous supermarket chains and large institutions like schools and hospitals. Green’s also holds regional rights to produce and distribute nationally-known specialty items, such as diet treats in the Weight Watchers food products line. In fact, they’re now the second largest producer of the fast selling Weight Watchers Treat Bars and are pushing hard toward the top spot. Largest single volume customer ‘treats’ entire East Coast insistence on begins here, with the milk in is the Hanover Klondike Company, located at Hanover, and the producer of the popular ice cream treat, the Isaly Klondike Bar. A 5600 gallon trailer-load of special Klondike mix goes out daily, six times a week, to the Hanover specialty farm. Green’s ice cream mixes, equal to some four million gallons of ice cream, begins with fresh raw milk picked up daily from 84 dairy farms, shipped by members of Interstate Milk Producers Cooperative. “We pride ourselves on quality control,” emphasizes Abby Green Little, and the consistent high ratings given the York dairy, by both state and federal inspections, attest to that concern. In order to uphold their demanding quality standards, milk from the shippers to Green’s is tested right at the dairy’s own lab, checked for bacteria, butterf at and antibiotics. Fluid milk and related products still comprise about ten percent of the total sales volume, with about ten million quart equivalents produced and packaged annually. Buy by far die bulk of the trader loads of raw milk that arrive at the plant are destined for the ultra modern ice cream processing route. In recent capital expansion projects, Green’s has replaced their ice cream mix batch processing pasteurizer with quality pi idts the bulk holding Abby Green Little, marketing manager, and her brother - James O. Green, comprise the third generation in the Clarence Green family dairy firm. continuous flow high-temperature, short-time equipment with a 2,000 gallon per hour capacity, and computerized mixing processes. With computer brain precision, milk, cream, sugar and corn ' sweeteners are blended in over 30 different recipes, according to the specifications of individual wholesale customers. Those mixes are largely packaged in five gallon containers, some half-gallon pure ■paks, and of course, large volumes sent out by trailer-load. But thousands of gallons of the mix is also daily piped from the pastuerizer to the adjacent ice cream manufacturing facility. Equipped with giant ice-cream freezers, the plant has the capacity of producing 3600 gallons of ice cream hourly. The finished ice cream is packaged into various popular sizes, from half-gallons down to tiny individual serving cups, and the newly-introduced “Texas pail,” a five quart plastic con tainer with metal handle that’s gained wide customer approval. And still another stainless steel piping system runs the thick ice cream mix into the novelty production vitaline machines, with their metal molds to shape pop sides, bars, and other dessert treats. Majority of the ice cream products are marketed through the All-Star Division. According to Jim Green, a high percentage of those are specialities and private labels, sold to such customers as Bor den’s, Sealtest, Breyer’s, Hood, Safeway, A & P, Weis and Acme. A staff of 250 employees keeps the three, round-the-clock shifts running smoothly every day but Sunday, and range from the pick- tanks that fill one entire wall of the recei area. up drivers who pump milk from farm tanks to the drivers who haul the finished product to wide-spread customers from Maine to Virginia. If Green’s suffer’s any real problems at the moment, it’s because of space, says Abby Green Little. Completely “landlocked” in the high density population of West ■York, Green’s is surrounded up the front and back doors with residential properties, streets, and the sprawling York Inter-State Fairgrounds. “1116 only direction we have to go is up,” laments the marketing manager. “And we’ve gone about as far as we possibly can in that direction, too, with the addition of more holding tanks.” So, while the Green’s management family is not making any vocal commitments about future expansion elsewhere, they’re well aware that the limited space factor will likely force some major change before the fourth generation moves in to help con tinue the York County tradition known as Green’s Dairy.
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers