As Kate’s Homemade Butter builds a new facility in Arundel, the company prepares for controlled growth—and even more of its better butter.
For 30 years, Kate’s Homemade Butter has been made in the basement
and garage of Dan and Karen Patry’s raised ranch in a residential
neighborhood of Old Orchard Beach. That’s about to change, as the family
business moves to a 17,620-square-foot facility in Arundel sometime
this summer.
Now under construction, the state-of-the-art manufacturing plant will
allow Kate’s to cut costs, lift capacity, and introduce more
products—beyond butter and real buttermilk, which they launched three
years ago—including cheese, ice cream, and other specialty foods. But it
will also represent a nod to the very roots of the company, long before
Dan and Karen Patry started selling butter in 1981. The steel-framed
building will be shaped like a dairy barn, sitting on a 40-acre field
with silos to store cream, a spring-fed trout pond, and a herd of 25
cows.
