THE first time the Food and Drug Administration sent an inspector to check out the dairy operation at Kate’s Homemade Butter, things did not go well.
“The guy wouldn’t even get out of his car,” said Daniel Patry, the
company’s good-humored founder. “He refused to believe it was a real
operation.”
Mr. Patry, who had worked in commercial dairies for decades, started
making butter here in 1981, in his garage. He had no cows and little
capital, but a lofty goal: to reproduce the fresh-tasting butter, made
from high-quality cream, that he remembered from growing up on a dairy
farm in nearby Minot, Me.
Today, Kate’s produces more than a million pounds of butter a year, all
from the same tiny garage. And last year, the company became the first
large-scale bottler of a dairy product that has almost disappeared from
American tables: real buttermilk, the creamy liquid that remains in the
churn after the butter comes together.
