Cabot Creamery is owned by farmers. Here is how the cooperative works
Photo: David Moore, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
The cheddar with the green-and-white label is one of the best-known Vermont products in the country, and it has a different ownership structure than most food brands. Cabot Creamery is owned by farmers.
It started in 1919, when 94 farmers in and around the town of Cabot pooled their money to buy a creamery and turn their surplus milk into butter. Cheddar came later. In 1992 the Cabot cooperative merged with Agri-Mark, a dairy cooperative based in Massachusetts, which now has around 700 member farm families in New England and New York.
How the co-op model works
Members own the business and ship their milk to it. The cooperative turns that milk into cheese, butter and other products at plants in Cabot, Middlebury and Chateaugay, N.Y., and sells them under the Cabot brand. Profits flow back to member farms. For small Vermont farms, the arrangement provides a reliable buyer for their milk in a market where prices can swing hard.
Cabot has leaned into the farmer-owned story in its marketing, and it became one of the first dairy companies to earn B Corporation certification as a cooperative.
Pressure on the farms
The co-op cannot fix the economics of dairy on its own. Vermont has lost most of its dairy farms over the past several decades, falling from thousands in the 1960s to a few hundred today, even as the number of cows per farm has grown. Milk prices, labor costs and water quality rules all weigh on members.
The Cabot visitor center in the village of Cabot has long offered tastings and a look at how cheese is made, and the cooperative’s retail stores along Route 100 serve the tourist traffic.
