Dl2-Uncaster Farming Saturday, June 22,1985
BY JOYCE BUPP
Staff Correspondent
FREDERICK, Md. - Joseph
Vona has his own strict personal
quality standards about milk.
“If it’s-not perfect, I won’t take
it.”
Vona, and his sons James and
Jody, own and operate Dairy Maid
Dairy, Inc., a fluid milk bottling
plant, marketing primarily
through the Baltimore-Washington
area.
He’s been on the front lines of the
phenomenal changes that have
taken place in the dairy industry
since he purchased the plant in
1945. Not that he had ever really
intended getting into the industry
in the first place.
An engineer by profession, Vona
purchased what was then known in
Frederick as Excelsior Sanitary
Dairy, as a business investment.
Excelsior processed and sold
Giant storage tanks line the walls of the plant, holding
products as needed between the various processing steps.
Tank readout gauges along the inside of the building make it
easy for plant personnel to monitor the contents.
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Dairy Maids standards: It's gotta be perfect!
between 1200 to 1500 gallons of milk
daily, all locally produced and
marketed primarily on routed
served by five home delivery
trucks.
But by 1947, the investment had
developed into a full-blown “good
family business.” Vona began
adding, changing, improving. And,
he’s never really stopped since.
“It seems like every six months
we’ve expanded something,
“chuckles this industry innovator.
What’s also changed, he
adamantly adds, is the quality of
milk coming off the dairy farm.
“There have been a lot of im
provements in milk coming into
the plant in recent years. Today’s
milk is the best ever - quality
wise.”
That rigid adherence to starting
with the very best quality has
resulted in a longer-than-normal
dairy case life for Dairy Maid’s
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products, up to 12 days. That’s
based on continued checks by the
state’s health inspection
programs, and attests to the
dairy’s strict quality standards.
Dairy Maid is wholly supplied by
members of the Middle Atlantic
Division of Dairymen, Inc. The
cooperative provides testing and
antibiotic screening for milk
supplies, with Dairy Maid running
its own quality grading as the
shipments are unloaded.
Incoming milk can be held until
needed in the plant’s two 25,000
gallon storage silos. Processing
five days a week as needs demand,
milk goes from storage through
separation while raw. Platelate
pasteurization assures continued
quality, with temperatures to 160
degrees, and a 5,000 gallon-per
hour capability. Homogenization
and standardization processes
further finish the product to
consumer needs.
As the face of the dairy industry
has changed, so has Dairy Maid’s
response to marketing trends. In
place of the historic home delivery,
with emphasis on frequent sales of
quarts, today’s customer picks up
milk at a market, often by the
gallon.
About 65 percent of Dairy Maid’s
fluid milk business is in the gallon
size. Twenty percent of sales are
accounted for by skim products,
and about 30 percent for lowfat, as
consumers gear their lifestyles
toward health and weight con
sciousness.
Dairy Maid also handles large
school milk volumes, serving five
county school districts in the state.
Between ten and fifteen percent of
the firm’s business is with the
military.
Packaging equipment is in place
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to meet the needs of this broad
scope of customers. Filler
machinery includes a standard
size for handling half-gallon,
quarts and pints. A gallon-size
filler and one strictly for
packaging bulk volume five-gallon
containers serve other container
needs.
To keep pace with their large
ig equipment at Dairy Maid enables milk to
be packaged in a variety of sizes, from school milk half-pints
up to five-gallon bulk containers.
Dairy Maid Dairy, Inc., Frederick, Maryland, has grown
from a 1500 gallon a day processor to a 40,000 gallon
volume. It’s owned and operated'by the father-son team of
Joseph Vona and his sons James and Jody.
*
container utilization, the Vona’s
have integrated state-of-the-art
blow mold technology, producing
plastic gallon and half-gallon
containers on site.
Natural gas and oil fuel the high
technology needs of this modern
dairy processing facility.
Engineered to energy savings,
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