Yoder Dairies to end home delivery, close Virginia Beach store

VIRGINIA BEACH

Yoder Dairies delivered milk to Karen Crain and her family for 19 years.

Crain stopped the service in September, with her children away at college and less need for the regular supply. When she learned Monday that the nearly 80-year-old dairy and delivery operation would soon close, the Virginia Beach resident rushed to the Yoder store on Princess Anne Road to stock up on chocolate milk.

"I'm not waiting. We need chocolate milk. We have it every Christmas," said Crain, arms loaded with one plastic gallon and two half-gallon glass bottles that she'll serve for the holidays and heat up for cocoa.

She lamented Yoder's demise: "This is another thing that's gone away that's been around forever."

Yoder, a Hampton Roads institution that has home-delivered glass bottles of milk and other dairy products since 1929, will leave the last orders at customers' doorsteps Friday. Across Hampton Roads, Yoder fans swore by the supremacy of its butter, eggnog and cream-line milk. They embraced the convenience and tradition of home delivery in old-fashioned glass bottles from a local dairy.

The dairy will finish its last bottling run this week to fulfill final orders. It has left letters with customers to let them know that it will pick up final payments and empty bottles next week.

Since January, as the nation's economic problems escalated, Yoder has lost 800 to 1,000 customers - about a quarter of the 3,800 homes on its delivery list, said Maria Olah, the dairy's general manager. As gas and food prices rose and families looked to cut costs, home-delivered milk was among the things they eliminated.

"We're an extra," said Olah, whose parents bought Yoder in 1996. "We're a nicety, I call it. We're not a necessity."

The lost sales made it increasingly difficult to keep the business running, she said. The company, which has about 35 employees, saw its revenue decline to the point that it could no longer pay to buy, process and transport milk.

"We don't want to discontinue, but we can't afford it anymore," Olah said. "You have to say enough's enough."

Yoder is the last of the region's family-owned dairies to shut down. Bergey's Dairy Farm, a 72-year-old operation based in Chesapeake that was faced with a wave of debts, sold its cows and stopped processing milk in 2005.

Yoder's Princess Anne Road store will remain open until its inventory is sold, probably by next week, Olah said. The company is considering keeping open its ice cream shop at the Virginia Beach Farmers Market, which it runs as a separate entity.

That gives a glimmer of hope to customers such as Jerry Harrison, who picked up four half-gallons of ice cream and a container of eggnog at the store on Monday. Harrison praised Yoder's natural ingredients and minimal preservatives. "And this is a very creamy ice cream," he added. "It's going to be missed tremendously."

Stores that have sold Yoder products, including The Fresh Market in Virginia Beach and Five Points Community Farm Market in Norfolk, won't receive any more shipments when they sell out, Olah said.

Five Points scooped up 249 half-gallons of Yoder ice cream as the last of its stock, said Bev Sell, general manager of the farm market, which has sold Yoder products since 2003. "It's a quality product and it's local," she said

The farm market's advocates have strived to convince consumers that they will lose local farms and other local producers if they fail to support them. "Maybe this is the wake-up call," Sell said.

Brothers Eli and Elmer Yoder, two Amish dairy farmers in Kempsville, started Yoder Dairies in 1929. It remained at least partially owned by their family until 1996, when Ken and Elsie Miller bought the operation from a group of stockholders, including some of the founders' descendants and other local dairy producers.

Before the Millers took over, Yoder began buying raw milk from a dairy farm cooperative based in Farmville. The dairy processes, pasteurizes and bottles the milk and other products.

In late 2006, the Millers shut down the old dairy building on Princess Anne Road and built a new facility that houses the processing plant and store. They expected to keep expanding the delivery operation, which had more than 5,000 customers at its peak in 2003, Olah said.

The Millers had formed a separate entity, K&E LLC, that owned the real estate. As the dairy's revenue thinned, Olah said, it had trouble paying its rent to K&E, which in turn struggled with mortgage payments and filed for bankruptcy in June. The Millers filed for personal bankruptcy a month earlier.

"Yoder's is kind of a heritage," said Joan Oglethorpe, who moved to Norfolk with her husband in 1950 and raised four daughters on Yoder's home-delivered milk. She now stops regularly at the store and was saddened to find Monday that it had sold the last of her beloved butter. "It's hard for me to think of them going out."

Carolyn Shapiro, (757) 446-2270, carolyn.shapiro@pilotonline.com