Creamery
CLIMATE-SMART MANUFACTURING Practices
Founded in 1994, Straus Family Creamery is a mission-driven, family-owned-and-operated business dedicated to making premium organic dairy products, with minimal processing. We are the first 100 % organic creamery in the United States. In 2019, the Marshall Creamery was the first in the world to receive TRUE® Zero Waste Certification. We left our Marshall home of 27 years in 2021 and moved to a state-of-the-art, eco-conscious, and efficient Creamery in Rohnert Park.
Our new Creamery was designed to help us become more efficient as a manufacturer while allowing more advanced sustainable practices. Potential enhancements include new technologies related to water capture and reuse, heat recapture, and more eco-friendly processes for cleaning the plant. Our goal is to achieve zero-waste production in the future.
Outside the Creamery is a 5,000 square foot drought-resilient landscape with more than 200 trees, flowering plants, shrubs, hedges, and grasses that conserve water, create pollinator habitats and foster ecological resilience. This landscape was built in coordination with the Conservation Corp North Bay.
Our Commitment to Reusable Glass Milk Bottles
Since our origins in 1994, Straus has bottled family farm certified Organic Cream-Top Milk in reusable glass bottles. Each glass bottle has a $3.00 deposit that is refunded when the rinsed bottle is returned to the store. The bottles are then returned to the Creamery, washed, sanitized, and reused an average of five times before re-entering the recycling stream. The bottles are made with up to 30% recycled glass.
Straus Family Creamery has more than 2.75 million glass bottles returned each year for reuse. Our bottle return rate is between 75% to 80%. The impact on our environment is profound as it keeps waste out of landfills and oceans. And that’s just one advantage of glass bottles. Milk poured from glass containers simply tastes better. The full, rich flavor of our organic milk and cream products are best preserved in glass because glass is inert and doesn’t chemically interact with any ingredients.
Low Carbon Electricity
At the Creamery, Straus purchases 97% carbon-free electricity through our partnership with Sonoma Clean Power. The Straus commitment to a carbon-free business includes several elements. We have energy efficient LED lighting, efficient cooling equipment, and a commitment to achieve efficiency through advanced equipment design and the use of high-efficiency motors, smart controls, and monitors.
WATER CONSERVATION
At Straus Family Creamery, we continually revise our production processes and implement new sustainable systems to minimize negative environmental impacts and conserve water. We do everything we can to ensure the food-making processes at the Creamery have a positive impact on the land. For example, we use potassium-based cleaning agents to avoid high concentrations of sodium in the water, because high levels of sodium are toxic to plants.
Electric Vehicles
Straus offers plug-in electric vehicle (EV) charging stations at the Creamery and office for its employees at no cost. As an early adopter of electric cars, we continue to do our part by advancing our fleet into EV or low-carbon fuel trucks as much as possible to replace gas-powered transportation