A22-Lancaster Farming, Saturday, May 24,1986
JULIE GOCHENOUR
UA Staff Correspondent
KERNSTOWN, VIRGINIA -
Combing fruit and milk has been a
farming tradition on Hedgebrook
Farm, Robert Hockman’s orchard
and dahry operation near Win
chester, Virginia. Now his
daughters, Kitty Nicholas and
Robin Eddy, have taken the idea
even further and added a third
operation to the family farm
yogurt.
Although both grew up on the
farm and Nicholas had been
managing the dairy for several
years, making yogurt was a totally
new agd different enterprise for
the sisters. “One reason it ap
pealed to us was because it was an
out-growth of our existing dairy
facility,” Nicholas explains. “We
also felt we could do well in
marketing and that it was going to
be a good money making en
terprise.”
Nearly four years and over
$100,000.00 later, they still feel that
way. Their product, Hedgebrook
Farm Yogurt, is an all natural
swiss-style yogurt with honey
sweetened fruit stirred in. While
the fruit must be ordered from a
specialty company, the jersey milk
is from the farm herd and the
sisters even use a local honey.
What’s more, the recipe is all their
own.
Production has come a long way
since Eddy stirred up the first trial
batches in her kitchen. Today, 45
Jerseys with a rolling herd
average of 13,000 pounds and 4.7%
butterfat provide the milk to make
500 gallons of yogurt a week. The
cultured product is 96% whole milk
with milk solids, stabilizer and
protein added. No thickeners are
necessary since Jersey milk is rich
enough to do the job alone.
You don’t learn that kind of
production on the back of a kitchen
stove, Eddy admits. Instead, they
visited yogurt operations like the
Colombo plant in Hagerstown, Md.
Alice Greer operates the wrai
«
commodate lour ounce cups.
Farming Tradition Combines Fruit & Milk
They also hired professionals to
develop a formula and culture for
their yogurt...as well as the
equipment and procedure to make
a marketable product.
The set-up is relatively simple.
“The cows are milked and the milk
comes directly from the udder into
our 500 gallon bulk tank,” Eddy
explains. “There it’s cooled to 38*F
as soon as it gets there—almost
instantly,” she adds. “Our
pasteurizer holds 250-280 gallons so
we withdraw the amount of milk
we want out of the bulk tank and
into the pasteurizer which is
double jacked and three zoned.”
“After we run as much milk into
the pasteurizer as we want, we add
what we need to add and then heat
up the milk and its contents to
185°F with a 30 h.p. industrial
boiler. We have three ther
mometers we use and when it
reaches this temperature, we hold
it for half an hour. Then we cool it
down to 110°F, stop cooling and
add the live, active culture.”
Their formula is somewhat
different than most, including not
only lactobacillus bulgarius and
streptococcus thermophilus
bacterias but also acidophilus.
“Acidophilus is the most important
one and that’s good for your
digestive system,” Eddy reports.
After the culture is added, the
mixture is agitated for 15-20
minutes and then rests for 10-12
hours to incubate.
Once the yogurt reaches a pH of
4.5, Eddy breaks the acidity and
cools it down to 70°F. It then moves
into the 100 gallon blending tank
where Eddy adds the fruit and
honey, making sure each batch of
Hedgebrook Yogurt tastes the
same. It’s quality control with a
personal touch.
“That’s our secret formula,” she
smiles. “We have strawberry,
raspberry, blueberry, cherry,
peach and vanilla,' and we do plain
also,” the younger sister lists,
ranking them in order of
popularity. “'But the plain is
machine.
(•vdope
Kitty Nicholas scrubs a milk tank in the on-the-farm yogurt operation
getting more popular for cooking.
People use it instead of
mayonhaise and sour cream, or in
their baking,” she elaborates.
When the fruited yogurt is ready,
it moves into an Anderson filler
which can fill 40 four or eight ounce
cups a minute. These are
mechanically dated and hand
packed into cardboard trays which
hold twelve cups. Once wrapped,
they’ll be stored in a cooler until
delivered locally or picked up by a
distributor to fill an order
Marketing is the other half of the
yogurt business. Both Eddy and
Nicholas have strong backgrounds
in marketing, but understand the
idea is not for all farm operations.
“It’s definitely not something the
majority of people have any
knowledge of—nor do they want
it,” Nicholas admits. “There’s a
better profit margin to be made on
a market ready product, but only if
you can get your name out there
and get people to buy your product.
That’s the most difficult thing.”
Keeping this in mind, the sisters
also hired a market research firm
to find out (1) what consumers
wanted to buy and (2) what would
encourage them to buy
Hedgebrook Farm Yogurt
specifically. The firm found there
was a demand for a high-quality,
all natural yogurt, especially in a
four ounce snack size that would be
suitable for small children.
This led Nicholas and Eddy to
choose four and eight ounce con
tainers for their product. The
jersey (cow) brown plastic cups
have a simple sketch of the “gentle
jersey” as a logo and include the
vwords “Made in the Shenandoah
Valley,” something most people
respond favorably, Nicholas ex
plains. A Circle around the logo
then indicates flavor and provides
a touch of color.
They still had to sell their
product though, and began
knocking on doors. Winchester is a
small city* about 90 miles west of
Washington D.C. and local
customers soon included the
Frederick County and Winchestr
school systems, the Winchester
Medical Center, independent
grocery stores and an area
distributor. The sisters have since
picked up other distributors which
sell their yogurt to, among others,
a chain of D.C. grocery stores
called Magruders, and now A&P.
“One problem we have is getting
stores to buy our product and then,
after they buy it, getting the
consumer to buy it...because they
don’t know who Hedgebrook Farm
is," Nicholas explains. “Whenever
we do demos in stores, we get
people to taste the product and
then buy it—lots of it. And then
they’re going to come back and
buy it again. But you have to spend
a lot of money to get people to but
your product uni ess you want to
The proof is in the eating Hedgebrook Farm yogurt
packaged in four ounce containers appeals to children.
wait maybe eight to ten years
down the road for your markets.”
This thinking was paid off.
Within a year of beginning com
mercial production, Hedgebrook
Farm Yogurt can be found from
Miami to Boston and as far west as
Ohio. An advertisig campaign is
also planned for the
Maryland/Virginia/D.C. market
beginning the first week in June.
This should introduce more people
to the farm fresh yogurt available
in their dairy case and make the
investment worthwhile, Nicholas
says.
All of this is a far cry from
marketing milk through a co-op,
she points out. “There’s no com
parison, it’s just like night and day.
There’s no selling involved with
producing fluid milk. Our only
responsibilities are producing the
best quality we can and getting the
most our of our cows we can per
head for the least amount of
money. Now when you get into the
yogurt business, you have to do all
that plus market your product.”
Robin Eddy shows linsjhtd product at Hedgebrook Farm.
Making yogurt isn’t going to
change things on Hedgebrook
Farm except make them all a little
busier, Nicholas promises. Both
she and Eddy are committed to the
family farm, and Nicholas is very
proud to be a dairy farmer. In the
past five years, she’s brought the
rolling herd average of her father’s
purebred and grade holsteins up to
21,000 pounds. This incudes more
than a 2,000 pound jump in 1985
which landed them Virginia’s most
improved dairy herd award this
winter.
Hedgebrook Farm Yogurt, the
sisters say, is their joint con
tribution to the farm their grand
paretns started in 1907. Nicholas
takes care of the dairy cows and all
the equipment while Eddy is in
charge of making the yogurt. Both
sisters then share the marketing
and other responsibilities. “It
really doesn’t count until you have
your own money and your own
blood and sweat and tears invested
in it,” Nicholas says.