Exterior of the Tillamook County Creamery Association plant near Tillamook

Tillamook’s creamery is still owned by the dairy farmers who supply it

ByDana Whitcomb

Photo: EncMstr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The cheese factory on U.S. 101 north of Tillamook draws visitors by the hundreds of thousands in a typical year, but the business behind it is older and more local than the gift shop suggests.

The Tillamook County Creamery Association was formed in 1909, when several small cheese plants in the county agreed to share a brand and a quality standard. The valley had dairy cows and grass in abundance and not much else in the way of market access, since roads over the Coast Range were poor and most goods moved by boat. Cheese kept well enough to ship. Butter and fresh milk did not.

Who owns it

The association is still a cooperative. Its member-owners are dairy families, most of them in Tillamook County, who deliver milk to the plant and share in the results. That structure explains a lot about how the company behaves. It has resisted outside buyers for more than a century, and decisions about expansion are made with the farms in mind as much as the brand.

The products moved well beyond cheddar long ago. Ice cream, yogurt, sour cream and butter now carry the Tillamook name in grocery stores across the country, and some of that production happens outside the county, including at a plant in Boardman in eastern Oregon.

The visitor center

The old viewing gallery was replaced by a larger visitor center that opened in 2018, with windows over the packaging lines, a food hall and an ice cream counter that gets lines out the door on summer weekends. For the county, the building works as a highway stop that keeps travelers in Tillamook long enough to buy lunch and gas.

The harder questions for the co-op are the ones every dairy region faces: fewer, larger farms, rising feed and land costs and the pressure that manure and runoff put on the bay and its oyster beds. The cooperative and county farmers have spent years on water quality projects in the Tillamook Bay watershed, and that work will matter as much to the brand’s future as anything on the shelf.

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