Donate to help Sweet Cow Yogurt keep up production
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Hello! My name is Diane and together with my family, we own and run a small-scale home-based yogurt manufacturing business called Sweet Cow Yogurt. The purpose of this fundraiser is that we need your help to raise $50,000 to purchase 2 pieces of equipment that will greatly reduce the time and manual labor that has been steadily building to keep up with the increased demand of our yogurt in the last few years.
Twenty years ago, our family of 9 embarked on an adventure to earn our financial support while providing a wholesome dairy product to our community. Five years into our adventure of purchasing our first cow to making and selling our newly branded ‘Green Mountain Yogurt’ at local Farmers Markets, we were shut down by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture due to the fact that we were not licensed to sell dairy products.
Devastated was an understatement at the time as we were faced with the choice of either having to start over doing something else to earn a living or spend a minimum of $150,000 to purchase the necessary milk storage and pasteurization equipment plus build a USDA legal dairy processing facility. The choice was easy since we didn’t have the means to buy the equipment so we quit making and selling yogurt at the markets.
Little did we know that our customer’s outrage of the FDA’s requirements for small scale producers being the same for the large corporations, together with their love and support of our yogurt led them to rally together to donate the funds needed for Vermont Technical College’s Engineering Class to build from scratch, the equipment we needed to become a licensed dairy processor. After going through the necessary hoops and hurdles of the licensing process including building a small processing facility with an addition on our house, in 2009 we became the smallest USDA licensed yogurt manufacturer in the State of Vermont. We were so overwhelmed with gratitude for the generosity of the community and to this day, we still feel so thankful for all the support we received throughout the years.
As our yogurt has become increasingly popular and the demand for it is growing, once again, we are faced with some tough decisions as these last few years have been challenging for us due to both the rising costs of materials and the labor intensive production schedule we maintain to keep up with this growing demand. The long hours and daily labor and energy usage with our current system is no longer profitable on the scale we are having to maintain and because of this, we need to upgrade our system.
We’ve done the research and are ready to take our business to the next level with your help. To continue doing what we love for our community and supporters throughout Vermont and New Hampshire, we are hoping to purchase 2 pieces of equipment. The first is a 50-gallon pasteurizer that will double the amount of yogurt we can produce in a day while also decreasing the time and labor by 75%. The other piece of equipment is a semi-automatic yogurt filling and capping machine…(see link below)
available to small producers like myself, that will automatically fill and seal a batch of yogurt in 1/4 the time it takes now. This will be a huge saver of time, energy and labor, while still producing the same quality yogurt that our customers love. The final step that connects with this new system is to phase out the plastic lids that we have been using on our 6oz. containers and transitioning to the more traditional foil seals. Sealing foil lids also needs precise timing, temperature and pressure only an automated system can achieve.
The total cost for the 50-gal pasteurizer and semi-automatic filler and sealer is $65,000.
We can put in $15,000 but need funding for the rest.
Please consider donating any amount that will help us reach a goal of $50,000 for us to purchase these 2 important pieces of equipment that will help us reduce cost, labor, energy, time and consumables.
In turn, we will continue to maintain the level of quality in our yogurt and in the ingredients we use including fresh whole Jersey milk, fresh fruit and pure maple syrup in our maple variety. We will also continue to process all the fruit that goes into our yogurt. And last but certainly not least, we will strive to keep our prices as low as we can to offer our yogurt at an affordable price so all can enjoy it.
We love what we do and want to continue this passion of crafting a quality product with ingredients that are so bountiful in our region. With your help we can continue doing just that!!
A huge THANK YOU to all of you for your loyalty, love of our yogurt and generous support!! It will not be forgotten and it truly means a lot!!
Sincerely,
Diane Wyatt
Organizer
DIANE WYATT
Organizer
Newbury, VT