What if someone offered you a miracle elixir that makes you live longer, helps you avoid all major illnesses and assures your children will be healthier as well? Does that seem too good to be true? Well Warren Taylor, the owner of Snowville Creamery in Pomeroy, would disagree.
He says the answer is simple: Milk.
“I like to say if you cut me, I bleed white. I just consume dairy products like crazy. I live on dairy products,” Taylor says.
But Taylor’s miracle elixir is not just any milk. Taylor and the other employees at Snowville Creamery strive to produce dairy products that start with grass-fed cows, which are treated humanely and cared for in a way that promotes sustainability. Taylor will be the first to tell you that his milk is not the kind found on your average grocery-store shelf.
“They’re different milks,” Taylor says. “They’re nutritionally very different, because these [cows] are eating grass. You know, garbage in, garbage out. If you lived on Twinkies and Snickers bars, you might grow big…real big, but how healthy would you be?”
James Winch, a five-year employee, started at the creamery as a tanker driver and now works as an HTST (High Temperature Short Time) employee in their testing lab. Winch heats the milk to pasteurize it and rid it of any pathogenic bacteria. He was inspired to work for the creamery after admiring its products as well as its process.
“I wanted to work here because I liked Snowville products,” Winch says. “I really liked the company and what they were doing.”
Taylor and his wife, Victoria, opened the creamery in 2006 and were producing their first milk by December 2007. But Taylor is not new to the dairy world. Like his father and his brother, he earned a Dairy Technician degree from Ohio State University. He later moved to California to run the largest peer-consulting company in the world, designing food processing plants and dairy plants.
Opening up a creamery had always been a dream for Taylor and his friends.
“Whenever we got into the third bottle of Cabernet when we were having a good venison ham, we’d start saying ‘We’ve gotta build our own milk plant and bottle this milk, by golly!’ ” Taylor says.
So when a paradigm shift in production within the dairy industry caused much of Taylor’s business to move to China, he had a decision to make. Taylor and his wife chose to chase his dream. Taylor closed the consulting company and took Victoria and his two kids, “barely out of diapers,” back to Ohio in 1994.
Today, the 6,000-square-foot plant sits on a 350-acre farm in Pomeroy with 225 cows. As well as their own cows, the creamery uses a dozen other farms’ cows in order to produce dairy products for all of the major urban areas of Ohio. The cows are all non-GMO (genetically modified organism) fed and as healthy as possible for milk production.
Snowville’s commitment to the health of its cows, its customers and the environment makes it a leader in sustainable food in Southeast Ohio and beyond.
But Taylor is most focused on the future, particularly on the health of the next generation.
“People say, “Why did [you] do this?’” Taylor says. “I say, ‘Because I was so mad, I was so angry at the lousy milk we give our children in this country.’ ”
Find us on Social Media