Darigold

Northwest Dairy Association (formerly the Northwest Dairymen's Association; trading as Darigold, Inc.) is an American dairy agricultural marketing cooperative and one of the nation’s largest dairy producers.[2] Darigold produces a full line of dairy products for wholesale, retail, and the foodservice industry, plus additional commodity and commercial ingredients. The company runs 12 production plants throughout the northwestern United States and has satellite offices in Mexico City and Shanghai. Darigold works with more than 250 family farms to meet their ever increasing product demands.[3][4]

History

In the period between the establishment of Washington’s first creamery in 1880 and the creation of the cooperative that would ultimately become Darigold at the end of World War I, the dairy industry had grown dramatically. By 1909, Washington was the nation’s third largest producer of condensed milk and ranked 13th and 15th in the production of butter and cheese, respectively, outpacing the indigenous demand. This overabundance of milk accorded the creameries with an appreciable advantage over the dairy farmers. Able to adjust the amount of milk they purchased to the shifting needs of their customers and generally dictate the price they paid for the milk from the dairy farmers, the creameries control over the fate of independent dairy farmers impelled some of the farmers by the turn of the century to form dairy cooperatives, such as the UDA (which would later become Darigold), to more effectively market their milk.

The Early Years (1918-1930)

The predecessor of Darigold Inc., the United Dairymen’s Association of Washington (UDA), was founded in the summer of 1918 in Lynden, Washington,[6] in response to the disruption of the dairy industry in the United States and the terrible plight of dairy farming in the aftermath of World War I.[7] One problem in the dairy industry involved maintaining an equilibrium between supply and demand. Although the cows produced milk at a consistent rate, the dairy market was not as predictable. When demand declined, dairy farmers were often saddled with a surplus milk and nowhere to sell once the market was sated. The dairy farmer’s only option was to wait for demand to increase. Consequently, five dairy cooperatives in the Pacific Northwest banded together to form the UDA.[8]

The UDA, in its effort to serve as a marketing federation for the cooperatives, hired the services of Seattle enterprising food broker Umberto "Bert" Dickey, to develop distant markets in which UDA members could sell their dairy products. He ran the Consolidated Dairy Products Company (CDP) which he founded in Seattle in 1920 and was extremely successful with it.[9] Established as a wholly owned subsidiary, the addition of CDP provided members with a new processing and marketing operation and extended the Darigold trademark to all UDA affiliates.[10]

In 1925, Dickey surveyed all of UDA's affiliated members on what the official brand name for their dairy products should be with and Darigold was the winner. The following year, Dickey registered his use of the Darigold trademark in the United States and six other countries in Europe, North America, and Asia.[11] Regional dairy associations, including one for Whatcom County, bought stock in Dickey’s Consolidated company.[12] In 1930, Dickey sold CDP to the dairy farmers of the UDA. Established as a wholly owned subsidiary, the addition of CDP provided members with a new processing and marketing operation and extended the Darigold trademark to all UDA affiliates.[13]

A year before Dickey sold his company to the UDA, he had constructed a new processing plant and purchased American Creamery and Bradner & Co and Mutual Creamery Company. Prior to the addition of the two creameries and the completion of the plant, a $300,000 building that could manufacture two million pounds of butter a year, CDP was strictly a jobbing concern, purchasing dairy products from other manufacturers and then selling them to retailers. The addition of the processing plant, however, enabled the company, for the first time, to provide distribution, processing, and marketing services to the 12,500 farms that shipped their products to CDP.[14]

trade name	Darigold, Inc.
type	Agricultural cooperative
foundation	1918
location city	Seattle, Washington
location country	United States
locations	12
area served	Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Montana
key people	Amy Humphreys (CEO)
industry	Agriculture, Food & Beverage Manufacturing
products	Butter, Cheese, Sour cream, Cottage cheese, Half and half, Milk, Buttermilk, Powdered milk, Dry whey powder, Soft serve ice cream powder, Coffee creamer, Eggnog (seasonal)
revenue	$2.3B ‡R1R‡ (2024)
net income	Not Publicly Disclosed
num employees	1,516
parent	Northwest Dairy Association
homepage	darigold.com

History

The Early Years (1918-1930)

1931-1959

External links

References