A lot has changed in the dairy industry in the 75 years since Ted Jacoby, Sr. founded TC Jacoby & Company in 1949.

Today, we share Part 1 of a special two-part episode celebrating TC Jacoby & Co’s 75 wonderful years in the U.S. dairy industry. From picking up 10-gallon milk cans on the farm in the 40s to shipping internationally, we’ve come a long way. Join Ted Jacoby II, Gus Jacoby, and Ted Jacoby III for part 1 of a special 2-part episode as we discuss:

How tank trucks fundamentally changed the U.S. milk supply

Consolidation in the dairy industry

When computers came for milk

Plus, Ted Jacoby II shares his eyewitness account of the introduction of ultrafiltration (UF) milk. It all began with a coffee break.

Join us for a walk down the milk memory lane in our 75th-anniversary episode, Part 1: Dive into our history.

Ted Jacoby III (T3): Welcome and enjoy the show.

Episode Intro: Welcome to the Milk Check, a podcast from TC Jacob and Company, where we share market insights and analysis with dairy farmers in mind.

T3: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Mouth Check. Today, we have a special edition of our monthly podcast because this year, 2024, TC Jacob and Company celebrates 75 years of servicing the dairy industry. In honor of this special anniversary, we are publishing a two-episode edition where, in the first part, my father, my brother Gus, and I discuss and, in my father's case, share tales of the first 50 years of our history. In part two, we share the more recent 25 years of our history and our thoughts on the future of this great industry we work in. Dad, I'll ask you: when Grandpa started the company in 1949, we still picked up milk in 10-gallon milk cans on the farm. So what was it like those first 10, 15 years of the company

Ted Jacoby II (T2): When my dad, your grandfather, got out of the Navy in 1945, I think he and two other fellas bought a dairy in Highland, Illinois, and you're right, they had milk coming into that dairy in cans. He and his partners operated that dairy for a couple of years. They sold the dairy to Midwest dairies. Midwest Dairies was then taken over by a company called City Corp. And City Corp, and Midwest Dairies had consolidated almost all the dairies in southern Illinois. All these dairies were consolidated, then spun off to Prairie Farms, and Fletcher Gorley took over Prairie Farms and turned them into one of the premier co-ops in the United States. After they sold the dairy, he booked office space in St. Louis on the ninth floor of what was the commerce building. So he would act as a broker of barrels of this and drums of that and set up shop as a middleman for mostly dairy ingredients.

There was a relationship that developed between us and Prairie Farms that has extended over all these years. We know each other quite well. The relationship has been strong for a long, long time. In the 40 years between the sixties and the nineties, pardon me, 30 years, you had several things occur. First of all, the consolidation people were picking up milk and bringing it to receiving stations, and then you could go from the receiving station to your regular market, or you could go somewhere else. There were receiving stations, called bump overs, which would consolidate the milk from many small farms and put it in a position to take it somewhere. You didn't have any dairies that shipped truckload quantities in the nineties in the Midwest. And then gradually, over that period of 30 years, you had large dairies that shipped truckload quantities, and that all occurred in the nineties and two thousand.

T3: Once those bulk tank trucks became common, when we started seeing milk move to the southeast in the fall when milk got tight,

T2: When tank trucks came in, it was about 1953 to 55, somewhere in that area, and the tank trucks were relatively small. 3,500 gallons was a big truck in those days, and when it became practical to move milk,