Southeast Foods

Mayfield: CEO Quality Award – Dean Food’s Top Honor built on TN-Southeast Farm-to-Table Dairy Heritage, Community Pride

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(Athens, TN) –  Mayfield Dairy in Athens, TN is the recipient of the Dean Foods CEO Quality Award for ice cream for 2016.  This award is the company’s top honor, and Mayfield Dairy Farms was selected over Dean Foods’ nine-other ice cream plants after a rigorous, year-long judging process.

“We are delighted with Mayfield’s excellence in protecting quality from farm to table, and we’re proud to hold them up as an example,” stated Mr. Ralph Scozzafavo, CEO of Dean Foods.  “Dean Foods holds its plants to very high standards, making for particularly stiff competition surrounding this award,” he said.

Mayfield plants in the Southeast have a history of receiving Quality awards.  The Athens plant has previously received Excellence in Quality recognition in 2016, 2015, and 2014.  The Mayfield / Barber’s plant in Birmingham AL received the CEO’s Quality Award two years in a row for 2015 and 2014

If you’ve grown up in the south, especially if you’ve been involved with dairy farming in the Southeast, “Mayfield Dairy” is a name that immediately combines the elements of high quality, in-demand milk and ice cream, and how the demand generated by such a local dairy plant impacts farms and the agriculture economy in an area.  As Mayfield has grown in sales through the decades, so has the southeast dairy farm community achieved continually higher standards of quality in on-farm practices of animal care and welfare, along with sanitation and technology of equipment in milking barns.

 

The CEO Quality Award was presented to Mayfield Dairy management and employees in Athens on April 21, 2017 by Dean Foods CEO Ralph Scozzafava.

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The Dean Foods CEO Quality Award is the culmination of an intensive assessment process. This year, five fluid milk plants and three ice cream plants, including Mayfield Dairy, were selected as Excellence in Quality Award winners based on multiple criteria such as Safe Quality Food (SQF) Program scores, training participation, and consumer complaint improvement.

Next, these eight plants were scrutinized further by Dean Foods’ senior leadership who took into account quality innovations, best practices, and the “quality culture” within the plant.  Mayfield Dairy emerged as the cream of the crop in the ice cream category.

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“I could not be more thankful for the team here in Athens,” said Scott Watson, Plant Manager.  “The products we manufacture reach the tables of families throughout the southeast and our folks do an incredible job of assuring that our ice cream is consistent day in and day out for our customers.  In short, we get to make and distribute ice cream for a living, and it it doesn’t get much more fun than that!”

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How does Mayfield stand in context with other dairy processing plants?

  1. Mayfield / Athens is one of 67 plants in the Dean Foods system, according to a 2015 article in Dairy Foods Magazine.  With revenues of over $8 Billion, Dean Foods collectively is the 2nd largest dairy food processor on the Dairy Foods Top 100 list, published this August by Dairy Foods magazine.  Summarized information about the companies on the Top 100 list, topped by Nestle, with revenues over $12 Billion, describes in more detail each of the top 100 companies.
  2. While Dean Foods has a branding footprint from coast-to-coast with DairyPure and TruMoo in some of their product lines (co-branded with time-honored regional brands), they are one of the largest supporters of LOCAL DAIRY COMMUNITIES, since each plant generally sources milk from dairy farms (many family-sized farm operations) within a close radius.
  3. In 2015, Dairy Foods Magazine published an article which related a broad-ranging description of the Athens plant complex, including some private label products,  its fluid and ice cream operations, and the quality priorities of the entire processing center.
  4. #47-225 and #47-131 – PLANT numbers are the key to knowing if your milk or ice cream brand may be processed and packaged at this award-winning plant in Athens!  To know if the milk or ice-cream you’re consuming is one of the brands or private labels processed at this award winning plant, check the Plant Code (mandated by law/regulation) found on each and every carton of dairy product processed here! The fluid plant number is #47-131, and the ice cream plant number is #47-225. The quality found at Mayfield Athens is the foundation of goodness for them all, and an indication you are supporting LOCAL farms in your area!
  5. Other southeast Dean Foods plants to watch for?   The code #01-0176 signals that an ice-cream product has been made at the Barber’s ice cream plant in Birmingham, AL, a previous winner of the CEO Quality Award.  #01-0104 signals that a fluid milk product is processed at the Dean – Barber’s plant,  also in Birmingham.  #13-230 is the code number meaning dairy products are from the Dean – Mayfield plant at Braselton, GA.   #45-01 is the Dean – Pet plant at Spartanburg, SC.   From Nashville, the Purity Dairies plant, known for award-winning chocolate milk, is #47-118, and the Country Delite plant, which processes a lot of private-label milks for independent grocery chains, carries the code #47-120.
  6. The local newspaper, the Daily-Post Athenian, just about a 1/2 mile away from the Athens plant, published a front-page report with photos of plant key personnel.

 

Mary Williams is the manager of the Mayfield Division of Dean Foods, which include the Mayfield Athens plant, a plant a Braselton, GA, and an ice-cream plant in Birmingham, AL, also known as Barber’s.  She also acknowledged the daily commitment and dedication of the Mayfield employees and associates which led to this quality award.

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The brand MAYFIELD is much more than ‘a carton to pick-up’  to the ‘home folks’ in southeast Tennessee, and a wider southeast radius about 200 miles from the site of the original Athens plant.  MAYFIELD is the key to consumer shelf space at grocery stores, and therefore a LOCAL connector between dairy farm families and marketplace.  Those MAYFIELD cartons mean that area farms are able to pay bills, support their families and local churches, pay property taxes which support local governments, and are a driver for the southeast Ag Economy.

Mayfield employees and area dairy farmers are neighbors, sometimes cousins, sometimes husband and wife, and often go to the same churches.  To say this is a LOCAL DAIRY Community is an understatement; the bonds of history are deep, and wide, and strong.  All take mutual pride in the success of each other in various family, community, and business, and personal achievements.

The Agriculture community adds their “Congratulations” to the many already received by Mayfield.  Farmers also say “THANK YOU” to Dean Foods for supporting our neighborhoods and dairy futures.  Many farm young folks have committed to a future in the dairy industry by investments in milking barns and housing facilities for maximum animal welfare.  The continued support of Dean Foods will bolster those futures as young farmers aspire to help feed the world well into the future.

Here’s to more Mayfield awards in the future!

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Happy New Year – Southeast #Local!

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Oh, my, we southerners are a bit intense about our New Year’s Day traditional meal! And since I’m getting more and more driven to identify and support ‘local’ growers, or at least farmers I know, I wanted my New Year’s tradition to include as much ‘local’ as possible.

From Southern Living to Garden and Gun to newspaper columnists to bloggers, paper pages and digital pages are filled with recipes for traditional New Year dishes like Hoppin’ John with rice, cornbread, black-eyed peas straight-up and black-eyed peas in salads and dips, and greens – always the greens (with vinegar, please!)

Are other parts of the country as crazy about a New Year’s Day tradition such as this?  (Tell me, please! What New Year traditions do you have?)

Anyhow, while I eat most foods produced in the US knowing we have the safest food supply in the world, of late I am getting more and more curious about where the farms are from which that food comes.  I often ask myself “Am I supporting a neighbor?” when I make a purchase.

I guess you could call me a proud, ‘consciously local’ consumer!

Most farmers in agriculture sell products on the ‘commodity’ market, and by so doing, it is very easy for the farmers’ faces to get lost, and a consumer has no idea which farms in which areas of the country they are supporting.

Because my family has farmed for at least three generations, and because I work on a daily basis with farmers who produce all sorts of products (milk, crops, beef, pork, chicken, lamb, farmers market produce & flowers, etc.), I am increasingly drawn to the question “How are we all going to be able to continue farming for another generation?”  “Can we financially be able to do that?”

While there are many factors that play into answering those questions, one of the main factors that enable a farm to stay in business is that sales of the products they are able to grow must have a viable market.  That ‘market’ must be of a volume large enough to sell a significant quantity of product to justify the expense of growing a crop.

I also am a great believer in viable farm neighborhoods local to me, or in some cases, which support a group of like-minded farmers I know. Those farms are sometimes 50 miles, most often 250-300 miles, and sometimes 500 miles or more from my East Tennessee stomping grounds.

So, I decided to play a ‘local’ game with my New Year’s Day meal – or as much as I could on a less-than-24 hour thought.   I shopped at 5 different food retailers in my small East Tennessee town, which included 2 mid-size grocery chains, 2 small grocery chains, and 1 dollar store. With a few more days thought (and more cooking time), I probably could have added a few more products, but time just ran out.

Here’s what I came up with (a combination of cooked from scratch and mixes of things out of a very convenient can), plus using milk and cornmeal that were already on hand :

3441_a_local_new_years_supper_f Breaking it down:

From Tennessee:  Buttermilk from Mayfield Dairy Farm, which buys milk from most East Tennessee dairy farms (likely 75% or more of the milk produced in East TN).  Since our farm grows corn which goes to a feed mill which in turn sells feed to those herds, this brand (and private labels which come from plants 47-131 and 13-230, as well as Weigel’s) is often in my fridge.  The cornmeal mix for the cornbread had a White Lily brand, but no East Tn wheat or corn would have been in that bag. [It would have approximately 20 years ago, before they closed their Knoxville mill.]

My pork (a smoked shoulder butt) was smoked by some ‘local’ friends who live in the same town I do, and purchased from a local food ‘bulk-sales’ retailer, but I have no idea where the hog houses are in which that pork (delicious) was finished!

From Louisiana: I tried a Brown Long Grain rice from Louisiana (approximately 700 miles or an 11 hour drive away).  Rice is not grown in Tennessee, and likely can’t very easily, so this was as close as I could get.  It was also my first time -ever – cooking rice the old-fashioned, long-time way on top of a stove!  (That also fit a  2017 resolution – new dishes, and new methods to cook.).  I was really pleased when I went to the Supreme Rice website to meet the growers – I feel like we could have the same language about John Deeres and such!  But that LA accent? Well, that would take an in person visit to see if we could understand the spoken word!

From South Carolina: My Black-eyed Peas and Greens (Margaret Holmes brand) were of the conveniently canned variety.  Following a label reference to McCall Farms, I also met the southeast farmers who likely grew these New Year’s staples.  These growers live about 350 miles and 5 and half hours from my table, so I could drop by on my next trip to the SC coast!  (‘On the way” is another form of local, isn’t it?!?)

I may not wait for a holiday or special occasion to play my next ‘how local can I make it?” game.  Would you consider joining me, and making a game of it?

Happy “Local Eating” New Year!