About UDairy Creamery

Our Story

The UDairy Creamery educates UD students in the principles of dairy production, food science and safety, environmentally sound agriculture, business management and finance. Perhaps most importantly, we seek to understand how to sustain agriculture in the face of land use change by incorporating these principles into a modern dairy operation.

We began our creamery efforts in the summer of 2008 by forming a CANR Creamery committee consisting of faculty, students, and staff from all CANR academic departments and Cooperative Extension. In the fall semester, four CANR students worked as a planning team with Dr. Carl Toensmeyer in the department of (then) Food and Resource Economics and developed a Strategic Marketing Plan that has provided valuable guidance to our planning efforts for the “UDairy” Creamery.

Ice cream distribution and sales began in the fall of 2008, when milk from our dairy cows was shipped to Kilby Cream in Rising Sun, MD and made into ice cream. In the winter of 2009, we began to cooperate with Hy-Point Dairy in Wilmington, Delaware. CANR broke ground on the UDairy Creamery’s flagship location in November of 2010. Opening April 30th, 2011, this storefront, on South Campus (next to Townsend Hall, serves as the center for our teaching, research, and Extension programs. Currently, our ice cream mix is sourced from a dairy in Pennsylvania. The plain ice cream base is flavored with our own unique recipes, frozen and packaged by UD student employees in the production area of our Flagship Creamery. 

In 2019, we opened the Genuardi Food Innovation Lab inside Worrilow Hall. Cheese production began in July 2019 when UDairy staff and interns began pasteurizing University of Delaware raw milk to make Delaware Gold (Colby-style cheese), fresh Cheddar Cheese Curds and First State Cheddar. Currently (2023), the Genuardi Food Innovation Lab is undergoing additional renovations to accommodate an ice cream mix processing line and continuous freezing to expand the production and the educational elements available to UD students. 

In June of 2021, The UDairy Creamery partnered with UD’s Barnes and Noble Bookstore on Main Street to open the UDairy Creamery Cafe. The Cafe offers all of UDairy’s current ice cream flavors, a full coffee menu and breakfast and lunch options that include UDairy cheeses. In addition to ice cream and cheese, the products available at the Flagship and Cafe locations include blankets made with wool from UD sheep, Angus Beef raised on CANR’s Webb Farm and honey from CANR’s apiary.