Straus Family Creamery, which brought organic milk production to the North Bay 15 years ago, is moving its headquarters from the grasslands of Marin County to an expansive warehouse in Petaluma.
Straus, known for selling its milk in glass bottles, is leasing a 30,000-square-foot facility on Industrial Avenue for its offices and warehouse space. The company's processing plant outside Marshall will continue to produce Straus organic milk, yogurt, butter and ice cream.
The change will triple the company's office space. It also will spare distributors from sending their trucks over a winding country road to pick up organic products sold in Whole Foods, Oliver's, Raley's and other grocery stores.
"The fact that we're going to have a warehouse in Petaluma is going to make it a lot easier for our customers to do business with us," said Rich Martin, the company's vice president of sales and marketing. It also will reduce the commute for many of the company's 70 employees.
The North Bay has been dairy country ever since farmers at Point Reyes sent butter and cheese by schooner to San Francisco 150 years ago. And the Straus family, which opened its dairy in 1941, shares in the industry's history.
In 1994 Albert Straus, whose father began the dairy, had the operation certified as the first organic dairy west of the Mississippi. That same year he opened a separate business, the Straus Family Creamery.
"They definitely were pioneers," said Leslie "Bees" Butler, an agricultural economist with UC Davis.
Besides the Straus dairy, the creamery obtains milk from two Sonoma County operations, the Tresch dairy near Petaluma and the Hughes dairy near Bodega.
Organic milk remains a small segment of the nation's dairy market. Only 86,000 of the country's 9 million dairy cows had been certified organic by 2005, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Demand for organic milk should continue to grow, Butler said, though not at the annual 20 percent increases of a few years ago.
Straus Family Creamery doesn't release sales and revenue figures. But Brie Johnson, the company's sustainability and communications manager, said sales continued to grow last year.
The company plans to move its offices to Petaluma in about two weeks. Within the next few months a large refrigeration unit will be installed in order to prepare the warehouse for storing the company's products, Martin said.
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