History

1858: Iowa State College founded as a State Agricultural College and Model Farm

1880: Seaman Knapp began teaching the first course in dairying.

1881: The first creamery was constructed on campus in 1881 and it was where the Food Sciences Building presently resides. The building was in close proximity to the Farm House, near where cattle were housed on campus. A wood structure, the first creamery was very small and was probably only designed to handle fluid milk, along with a few value-added dairy products, most likely butter.

1892: A new, larger creamery is built and the original creamery became the farm manager’s residence. The new creamery was located just to the south where East Hall now sits and was also completely constructed of wood. The new creamery subsequently led to the establishment of a four-year dairy program.

1905: A third, even larger creamery is built with the capacity to train students in market milk handling, butter manufacturing, ice cream manufacturing, and cheese making, and to house administrative offices and research facilities. This building has since been renamed East Hall.

1906: Iowa State enacted an agricultural extension program.

1926: The Iowa State Legislature funds new dairy building on campus to accommodate the increasing enrollment. 

1927: The new dairy building cornerstone is laid (it can still be seen at the northwest corner of the Food Sciences Building on Farm House Lane). Hence the date of '1927' on the bottom of our current Creamery logo.  With space for manufacturing butter, handling market milk, making cheese, condensing milk, drying milk, testing dairy products, cold storage, and space for chemical and bacterial analysis of dairy products. The building contained manufacturing laboratories that served both for teaching and as a commercial creamery. Everything produced was sold, and students learned by working in these laboratories.

1928: Creamery operations and dairy processing classes on campus were organized into the Dairy Industry Department. Iowa State College was noted as having the finest butter in all of the state of Iowa. Furthermore, Iowa State’s Dairy Judging Team, as it was called then, won the National Dairy Products Evaluation Contest from 1924-1928. The dairy products judging team would also go on to win in 1931, 1939, 1940, 1948, and 1950. With the completion of the Dairy Industry building, the department grew tremendously and was quite esteemed among other dairy programs around the country.

1937: Professor Bernard Wernick Hammer and graduate student C. B. Lane develop the Lane-Hammer process for making blue cheese with homogenized milk. Enrollment waned through the Great Depression and World War II.

1968: The Dairy Industry Department changed its name to the Department of Food and Dairy Technology.

1969: The Iowa State Creamery closes. Dramatic changes in the dairy processing industry heightened challenges for small-scale dairy businesses.

2009: The Food Science and Human Nutrition department hired Dr. Stephanie Clark (B.S. in Animal Science, M.S. and Ph.D. in Food Science from Cornell University) who re-established the Dairy Products Evaluation Team. She also taught dairy food science courses, and conducting dairy research.

August 21st 2020: Stephanie Clark, Sarah Canova, and María Bárbara Mora García re-established the Iowa State University Creamery. In addition to offering hands-on training to students and short courses to entrepreneurs, the ISU Creamery makes cheese and ice cream products from scratch and offers them for sale in their retail shop, located in the former Dairy Industry building.