Nearly every Southerner has enjoyed a dairy treat made by Mayfield Dairy Farms, whether it's a cold glass of milk, a bowl of sweet ice cream or a frozen Fudge Bar. The East Tennessee dairy has been producing milk since 1910 and ice cream since 1923, and visitors can see the entire process at the Mayfield Dairy Farms Visitor Center in Athens.
"We are located right off Interstate 75 between Knoxville and Chattanooga, so it's a convenient stop for people traveling to either of those cities," says Donna Ballew, the Visitor Center coordinator. "We like for people to know we've been here for more than 100 years. We have about 100,000 visitors each year from all over the country and the world."
When Mayfield first began producing milk in 1910, the dairy only had 45 Jersey cows. Today, Mayfield is owned by Dairy Farmers of America and receives milk from 169 dairy farms, with an average herd size of 180-200 cows per farm.
"It takes 20,000 cows milked twice a day to produce the amount of milk we need at this plant," Ballew says. "We get most of our milk locally within a 71-mile radius. On average, we take in about 1.1 million pounds of milk per day at our plant."
Four days a week, visitors can purchase a tour ticket and go behind the scenes of Mayfield Dairy Farms. The tour begins with a 10-minute history video about the company's heritage and the Mayfield family.
"Then you put on a lovely hair net and enter the first department where we produce our own yellow jugs for our milk," Ballew says. "Through the glass wall, you can watch the yellow plastic being blown up like a balloon. Then it touches a mold and cools off to make the jugs."
Tour-goers follow the yellow jugs along a conveyor belt through a tunnel across the road into the milk packaging department, where they watch different sizes of containers being filled. Machines fill gallons, half gallons, quarts and pints. Smaller half-pint machines work to fill the smallest cartons of milk for schools and hospitals.
"That department produces 3 million of those little half-pint cartons every week," Ballew says. "As a whole, the milk packaging department fills 200,000 gallons of milk and orange juice every day. In late October and through the holidays, we also do Egg Nog."
After leaving the milk packaging department, visitors get a glimpse of the processing department, where they can see vats of milk being pasteurized. Then they travel through a room where the packaged milk is dropped down into cases, which go into a cold room where they are later pulled for orders and loaded onto trucks.
A highly anticipated portion of the tour is the ice cream department, which has two levels. From the upper level, visitors can look down into the entire ice cream department and see vats where the cream is being mixed with other ingredients. Mayfield packages about 42,000 gallons of ice cream per day and makes 60 different flavors.
"We use 11,000 pounds of chocolate fudge in one production run of our Moose Tracks ice cream, and we use over 9,000 pounds of chocolate cookies in a production run of Cookies & Cream," Ballew says. "At Christmas time, we have Peppermint Stick Ice Cream, and during Thanksgiving, we make a delicious Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream."
To close out the tour experience, visitors watch the ice cream being packaged and can see it travel on conveyors into freezers. Every tour ticket includes the opportunity to taste two flavors of ice cream and enjoy a full scoop of Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, Mint Chocolate Chip or Super Cow – a fun combination of pink, blue and yellow vanilla ice creams. For $1 more, you can choose any flavor of ice cream from 26 different seasonal varieties.
"The three most popular flavors at the Visitor Center are Vanilla, Cookies & Cream, and Moose Tracks," Ballew says. "Often when people come in, they want to try something new, like our Smoky Mountain Fudge or Strawberry Cheesecake ice creams. But our No. 1 flavor is still Vanilla."
Mayfield Dairy Farms operates a second plant in Birmingham, Ala. where their frozen novelties such as Fudge Bars, Ice Cream Sandwiches and Brown Cows are made. But the flagship Athens plant is the only one open for tours.
"Mayfield has always been a strong Southern brand. Visitors tell us stories about how they remember their first Nutty Buddy or when their parents would have milk delivered to their front porch," Ballew says. "People recognize Mayfield as part of their childhoods."
In 1981, TIME Magazine named Mayfield the "World's Best Ice Cream," and that title has stuck with the dairy ever since.
"People are very curious about our title as the World's Best Ice Cream, so that's a big draw. They want to see what we are all about," Ballew says. "And it's rare nowadays to be able to actually go inside a plant with the workers and see how something is made, so we are a real novelty. And of course, ice cream gets them every time."
If You Go ...
The Mayfield Dairy Farms Visitor Center is located at 4 Mayfield Lane in Athens.
Tours are offered on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Tours take place every hour, with the last tour beginning at 3 p.m.
The Visitor Center is closed on Wednesdays. The Mayfield Ice Cream Parlor and Gift Shop are open on Saturdays, but there are no Saturday tours. Please call ahead for tour groups larger than 10.
For more information, visit mayfielddairy.com or call (423) 649-2653.
