Today, Land O’Lakes, Inc. has purchased Vermont Creamery to accelerate growth in our important Dairy business with trusted brands and innovative products. We are particularly excited about the acquisition because of the unique fit of our organizations. We are both in growth mode and both excited to tell our story more broadly. We both have a culture based on strong rural values and an appreciation for purpose and people. We both have high-quality products and brands and a very deep connection to farmers. Read more about the acquisition in this press release.

For those of you unfamiliar with Vermont Creamery, the creamery is a pioneer of the artisan cheese-making movement in America.

How does this relate to Land O’Lakes? Vermont Creamery markets cheeses and specialty dairy products in attractive high margin, fast growing segments and into channels that give Land O’Lakes opportunities to access new customers, channels and growth. The LAND O LAKES brand also stands for quality products that, like Vermont Creamery, have become the preferred dairy products for consumers, chefs and bakers across the country.

And similar to our dairy business, Vermont Creamery has grown steadily throughout its history and earned hundreds of awards for its family of products. This acquisition gives us the opportunity to expand our portfolio of value-added branded businesses and build an understanding of customers outside of our traditional demographic.

Today, Vermont Creamery leverages a relatively small amount of cows’ milk as many of its products are made from goats’ milk. Moving forward we expect this acquisition to help strengthen our partnership with Dairy Marketing Services in the northeast and potentially provide additional opportunities for member milk as we look to expand the value-added product offerings made from cows’ milk.

While we are excited about the opportunity this provides to accelerate growth in our Dairy business, we know many of you will have questions about this acquisition so we have compiled a questions and answers document to address what we know at this time.

It’s worth noting that Vermont Creamery’s co-founders, Bob Reese and Allison Hooper, say Land O’Lakes is the ideal new owner. They recognized that, at our core, Land O’Lakes is truly a farm-to-fork organization dedicated to delivering value to farmers and realizing our purpose of feeding human progress. We welcome Vermont Creamery to the Land O’Lakes family and look forward to our shared future success.