The storied Willamette Valley creamery is expanding its product line this year to include kids’ products — and probiotic butter.
Blake Thompson’s grandparents, Chuck and Sue Kesey, started the Springfield Creamery and Nancy’s Probiotic Yogurt 65 years ago. In 2012, Thompson began working on the production floor alongside his brothers; then he went to grad school. After obtaining his MBA, Thompson went back into the family business as the company’s chief innovation officer.
The Springfield Creamery has long had counterculture bona fides that didn’t just help with branding but one occasion actually saved the business. In 1972, just a few years after it had opened, the creamery was in danger of going under. Chuck called on his brother, Ken, who as the author of the critically and commercially successful books One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion and the subject of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was a towering figure in 1960s and 1970s counterculture. He in turn called a few famous friends, including the Grateful Dead, whose fundraising concert in Mt. Pleasant helped keep the struggling business alive.
Earlier this fall, Thompson spoke with Oregon Business about his role at the creamery and two new products: a line of kids’ yogurt pouches introduced earlier this year, and a line of cultured butter scheduled to hit store shelves this month.
When you talk about product development, what does that process look like?
It’s pretty cross-functional. A lot of it is coordinating conversations with the sales team, the marketing team, our finance team, in order to identify different product opportunities, different opportunities in the market. And then comes the fun work of once that opportunity has been identified, developing the product and really crafting a product that we feel is going to be differentiated in the marketplace, and then maybe attract some new consumers, or attract our current consumers into that product or different category. I work with a food scientist consultant who is incredibly helpful in that process, and then we have to figure out how to scale it, and how do we physically make it on the production floor? And so the maintenance team, and my uncle, the head of operations, are very key in that.
You have some new products out this year. One of them is a squeeze packet, is that correct?
We just launched kids’ pouches in January of ’24. There are three flavors of that, and that product is geared for kids. Strategically, we identified that we did not have a product for that segment of consumers, and we felt that we could create a probiotic, organic, real fruit and veggie flavored, pouch for kids to consume. I think it’s been a great success, and had a great launch with Whole Foods, and has now started to venture out with other retailers.
At the same time, we have an upcoming innovation launch coming in November with Whole Foods and some other local retailers that is an organic butter. We have a sea salted and we have an unsalted organic butter that is launching just in time for the holidays.
Have you made butter before?
Butter is a new category for our brand. We’re really excited to add kind of a staple category from a consumer perspective to our offerings. We felt that we could make a really high quality cultured butter and create a formula that allows some maybe deeper level taste profiles to consumers, whether they’re baking it or putting the salted on their toast or whatnot. So I think that we’ve achieved that.
You mentioned with the kids’ pouches that kids haven’t really been who you’ve thought of as your market before. How did those conversations start, and what was the full process?
When we talk to our core consumers, we often hear that like, “Oh, I grew up on this product. I had Nancy’s kefir every day” or “I’ve been drinking your organic milk for 25 years.” We wanted to create that habitual health food relationship with a with a different generation of consumer, and we felt that the starting with the kids segment, and something really specified for for kids, allowed us to start to create that experience with a younger consumer. That product is interesting because you’re actually selling it to adults. The parents are making the purchasing decision, but the children are obviously the consumers. So it was a little bit different process there for us as well that we learned a ton from..
Why that packaging format? Why the squeeze pouch and not, say, individual sized cups?
It came from experience, really. I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old, and as we watched our own purchasing habits and how simple it is to be able to give a kid a pouch and not have to deal with a messy spoon falling on the ground off of their high chair. It was really the perfect format. I think that that ability to on the grab and go a quick meal, quick, healthy meal for a kid is highly valued by parents.
Is this more for younger kids or grade schoolers for lunches?
It’s really geared towards preschool to to sixth. Our in-house graphic artists did a fantastic job with the graphics and making them fun and really playful and appealing. And I think that that was really the target audience for that product was, was something that we can put in a kid’s lunch as they as they take cold lunch to school.
And on your other new product, what was behind that decision to expand into butter?
It came from a couple areas. One was identifying the void in the marketplace for a well-positioned, reasonably-priced cultured butter. We felt that our brand, Nancy’s Probiotic Foods, and our products are known for its level of culture and the amount of probiotics in it, and we felt that there was not an offering of a cultured butter on the market that is in organic format. We also looked at it from the plant manufacturing side. At the time, had a surplus of organic cream to make butter. So wanted try to maximize that utilization of every dairy component that comes into the facility, and butter was a great avenue for us to maximize that cream.
Can you tell me a little bit about how your how your dairy products are sourced?
There’s three main types of milk that we bring in the plant. We’re very fortunate just geographic location, that the milk quality that we have here locally is superb, and it’s a lot to the climate to the farmers that are working to produce high-quality milk on their pasture raised farmsMost of it comes from within about a three- or four-hour radius of the plant. We work with a couple of different organic pools. We work with one natural milk pool, and then we also have a pool of milk that’s 100% grass-fed organic. And so again, very fortunate that it’s local and we’re not having to add a ton of freight and time to that — that just leads to quality degradation.
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