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Nielsen Family Knows Secret of Good Cheese

Posted on: Tuesday, 4 October 2005, 18:00 CDT

By Marlene Lucas, The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Oct. 3--INDEPENDENCE -- Iowans may be eating cheese from a prize-winning cheese maker and not even know it.

Wapsie Valley Creamery in Independence is to the cheese industry what ghost writers are to autobiographies. The creamery makes cheese and sells it in 700-pound blocks to food companies that cut the cheese and put their own labels on it.

Wilbur Nielsen, vice president of the creamery, says Iowans are buying the cheese made in his family's business, but he can not identify it without breaking agreements with his customers.

Eastern Iowans will have to be satisfied in knowing that this creamery in their back yard, once again, earned grand champion honors in the cheese judging contest at this year's Iowa State Fair.

"We've won grand champion or champion ever since they started doing it," says Nielsen. Winning year after year takes "hard work, good employees, great milk supply, modern equipment. (You) have to pour money back into the company to stay successful."

The creamery, with 15 miles of stainless steel tubes, handles 1.2 million pounds of milk a day. The milk comes from 350 dairy farms in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois.

The creamery is large compared to Iowa creameries but small compared with others in the nation. Some in New Mexico and California handle 10 million pounds of milk a day, Nielsen says.

"When I was a boy, there was creamery or cheese factory on every corner. Farms are getting bigger and factories are getting bigger and so are we. We're small enough we can react to changes quickly," says Nielsen, 80.

Nielsen and his son, Mark, president of the creamery, are graduates of Iowa State University. Wilbur applies his degree in dairy industry and Mark uses his degree in industrial engineering. Another generation of Nielsens is studying at ISU.

The creamery's 70 employees back up the Nielsens and a few regulatory groups back up the employees and the dairy producers.

"The Iowa Department of Agriculture has inspectors that call on each farm. The Iowa Public Health follows them, to the farms and the creamery, to see how good we're doing," Wilbur Nielsen says.

Companies that buy the creamery's cheese send inspectors, and the U.S.

Department of Agriculture inspects the plant on a regular basis.

"The Food and Drug Administration comes around when they feel like it," he says. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources checks the creamery's smoke stacks.

"We're heavily regulated. It helps us do a good job," Nielsen says.

The creamery makes Colby, Monterey Jack, Marble and Pepper Jack cheese. The plants spends a considerable amount of energy drying whey, a by-product of cheese making, to a powder that primarily is used in baby formula.

"The thorn in our sides is the cost of fuel,' Nielsen says. Each month, the company pays $48,000 for electricity and $120,000 for gas.

"We don't have the ability to set our price on our product. That's done by the cheese market. It's true of our industry and our producers.

Seems unfair to me," he says.

Next year, the creamery will observe its 100th anniversary, an event that will celebrate the work of Nielsen's father, Clarence, who became manager of the creamery in the 1920s; Wilbur, who joined the company in 1949; and Mark, who was appointed to management in the 1980s. Wilbur Nielsen is calling it a century of progress.

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To see more of The Gazette, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.gazetteonline.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Gazette - Cedar Rapids, Iowa

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