North Dakota Dairy Processors Churn Out Award-Winning Ice Cream, Gelato and More
In partnership with: North Dakota Department of Agriculture
Maartje van Bedaf of Carrington has fond memories of visiting gelato shops as a child in her native Netherlands.
“I thought it would be fun to bring gelato to North Dakota,” Maartje says. “We already had the main ingredient – milk – at our fingertips.”
In 2018, Maartje launched Duchessa Gelato and began making gelato using fresh milk from her family dairy’s 1,500 cows. She started with a mobile gelato cart from Italy and set up at farmers markets, weddings and events. Her business quickly grew, and now customers can order gelato online.
Maartje churns the gelato in her parents’ garage but is building a Grade A processing facility with her husband, Casey Murphy. The couple started Cows and Co. Creamery in 2020 and plans to add fresh cheese curds and artisan Gouda cheese to their product line by summer 2021.
“Gouda is a Dutch cheese, so to bring that to North Dakota is a perfect opportunity for us,” Maartje says. “You can do a lot of fun things with milk; it’s a great outlet to be creative. When using milk, cream and sugar, it’s not hard to make something taste good.”
See more: North Dakota Dairy Farms Produce Top-Shelf Milk
Pride Dairy
Ice cream is another dairy dessert produced in North Dakota, and Kriss Allard can attest that there’s always a demand for the tasty treat. His company, Pride Dairy, has been in business since 1930 and sells 200,000 gallons of freshly made ice cream every year. Pride Dairy is known for its award-winning Thomas Jefferson Vintage Vanilla – the No. 1 selling ice cream at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
“Mount Rushmore had Jefferson’s handwritten ice cream recipe hanging in their dining area and had reached out to several ice cream makers to see if they could replicate it to sell in their shop,” Allard says. “Jefferson used to make the ice cream and serve it to dignitaries while he was in office. We had to change a couple of things – mainly that he used raw eggs, and we don’t – but we were granted the rights to make it for them.”
Pride Dairy makes 23 flavors of ice cream in Bottineau, including an unusual black licorice ice cream.
“We source as many of our ingredients locally as we can,” Allard says. “Juneberry is one of our most popular flavors, and those are grown locally, as well as our chokecherries and some of the rhubarb.”
Prairie Farms
In May 2020, the award-winning dairy cooperative Prairie Farms purchased the former Dean Foods milk-processing plant in Bismarck. The Bismarck plant employs 70 people and bottles fluid milk in whole, 2%, 1%, skim and three different chocolate varieties. They also bottle buttermilk, half-and-half and heavy whipping cream.
“We ship milk to schools for lunches, and we even do 5-gallon bags of milk for university cafeteria milk dispensers,” says Tara Stiles- Rath, quality manager for Prairie Farms-Bismarck. “We process 6 million gallons of milk every year just at our site.”
“A lot of pride goes into our products, and we always keep farmers’ best interests in mind.”
–Tara Stiles-Rath, quality manager for Prairie Farms-Bismarck
Headquartered in Illinois, Prairie Farms has 52 dairy-processing plants throughout the Central Time Zone. The cooperative includes more than 700 farm families.
“A lot of pride goes into our products, and we always keep farmers’ best interests in mind,” Stiles-Rath says. “In North Dakota, we work with 12 family farms – the same farms we’ve worked with for decades.”