Utah creamery defaced over its sale of a controversial product

Someone’s crying over raw milk.

This week, a vandal peeved by the controversial product took to defacing the front of an Ogden creamery in a display that one of the business owners called “startling.”

The Rose family founded Milk Barn Creamery to provide fresh raw milk products to the public from its family farm in Morgan. The creamery has locations in Ogden, Morgan and Centerville, where they sell jugs of raw milk, raw cream and pasteurized ice cream, according to the company’s website.

On Monday morning, a family friend notified Trevor Rose, one of the Milk Barn owners, that the Ogden store at 1327 Wall Ave. had been vandalized. Written on the storefront was “S--- milk sold here,” and “RFK approved,” an apparent to reference to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s affinity for raw dairy.

Rose said the company has filed a police report but surveillance footage didn’t capture a good angle of the vandal.

“We’re bummed about it, and it’s obviously startling as a business owner to have any sort of targeted vandalism on your door,” Rose said. “But it cleaned off easy. Nobody was hurt. Nothing was damaged.”

Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized. The pasteurization process heats milk for a specific amount of time to kill off harmful bacteria. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have concluded pasteurization is the only way to assure the destruction of such microorganisms.

Milk Barn doesn’t disagree with those findings, but Utah law has established conditions for the sale of raw milk so individuals “may purchase raw milk in spite of the known risks if they so choose,” according to the company’s liability waiver.

The company requires customers to acknowledge and sign the waiver at their first visit to the creamery, and the document states individuals who purchase products agree they have informed themselves of the “assumption of risk” with unpasteurized milk.

However, each batch of the company’s raw milk is tested by an independent lab and must meet “strict quality and safety standards” before it’s released for sale, according to a Facebook post from the company. Milk Barn has never had a batch come close to state limits concerning bacteria counts, Rose added.

“A lot of people find benefit in that, that it doesn’t go through the pasteurization,” Rose said. “That way it has some of the bacteria that helps gut health and things like that, too, that get lost in pasteurization.”

Products produced by Milk Barn have been “pretty incident-free,” Rose added, and are produced from a little over 30 cows at their small family farm.

“We will move on,” Rose said. “But we just want to say thank you, too. We’ve had an outpouring of support from from [the] Ogden community and all of our customers throughout northern Utah. We’re super grateful for everyone... We just want to keep farming.”