Editor's Note: I met the Mast family 18 months ago after finding their milk in Crossville. With all the publicity and concerns about the big box chain store dropping well-recognized milk brand I thought I would update this story and reshare it. You can find Sunrise Dairy products in the smaller chains including IGA, Sav-A-Lot and other stores. Buy local!
Sometimes the old ways remain the best ways.
That is the idea of the Mast Family, operators of the Sunrise Dairy near Mayland, about 10 miles west of Crossville that is now retailing a number of locally produced milk products in Cumberland and several surrounding counties in Middle Tennessee. The Masts are Mennonite and often do things the old way including bottling milk in glass half-gallon and quart bottles.
The whole family pitches in on bottling operations
The dairy operation of the Mast Family has been in operation for 31 years, up until this year furnishing wholesale milk to commercial milk processors, but in January 2016 they began bottling and distributing their own labeled milk from their location on Bud Tanner Road and the demand continues to increase as more customers appreciate the products and the flavor.
The Mast Dairy Farm looks much as you'd imagine it.
The patriarch of the Mast family is John Mast, 74, who moved to Cumberland County in 1979 with a group of Ohio Mennonites. John explained that the family had purchased the dairy farm in 1985 and has operated it since then. The dairy farm generates some 200,000 pounds of milk a month or around 23,000 gallons. The amount of milk going into the retail operation has doubled from an initial 10 percent of the output to about 20 percent and continues to grow.
John's son Tim Mast along with son-in-law Marc Miller run the retail and bottling operations in partnership with the dairy farm. Younger members of the family also help out as is typical in Mennonite families. Children are educated through the 8th grade according to Tim and then work in the family business like his teen children Ryan and Kendra.
You can shop at the farm store for milk and other products
Just off Highway 70N on
Bud Tanner Rd.
Currently, the Sunrise products are available in 4 Crossville locations as well as Cookeville, Monterey, Sparta, McMinnville and Pulaski. In addition, the family sells at both the Knoxville and Oak Ridge Farmers Markets. Sunrise is currently looking for additional outlets, especially in the Cookeville market. To contact the dairy, the phone is (931) 277-3777. Being Mennonite, they don't use email.
The Sunrise bottling operation includes a retail outlet one-half mile off of Highway 70N on Bud Tanner Road. Visitors can even watch the bottling operation if they visit at the right time. Because of the Tennessee promotion of agricultural products, purchases at the store are sales tax-free. In addition to the dairy products the store sells beef and pork from neighboring farms too. The farm store is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 AM to 5 PM.
Current Sunrise products include their top seller, chocolate milk and in second place is their non-homogenized whole milk. The whole milk includes the cream that comes to the top just like milk from the old days.
Other milk products are homogenized and include 2 percent, skim milk and strawberry flavored milk. Recently added to the product mix are buttermilk, butter and Ice Cream too.
The Sunrise Dairy milk is pasteurized but uses the older vat method that brings the milk to 145-degree temperature slowly over 30 minutes so it does not remove the good bacteria or enzymes. Other milk processors force the milk between highly heated metal plates up to 180 degrees to do the job faster, often at the cost of the milk's natural flavor.
Tim Mast proudly described their best selling chocolate milk saying, “It's not what we put in, it's what we don't put in it.” The ingredients are 2 percent milk, sugar and chocolate and the vitamin added to all milk.
Another thing that Tim said was in their favor was the growing interest in people buying local and the drive to reuse and recycle. The dairy's glass bottles keep plastic out of the landfills and are reused when customers return them. Milk is also sold now in one-gallon plastic bottles for those who do not want to return glass bottles.
Milk is available in both half-gallon and quart bottles. The glass bottles have a $2 deposit that customers get back when they return the bottle to the store. The glass bottles are washed and reused when returned to the dairy. The Masts say people have taken to the glass bottles better than they initially thought they would and the glass keeps the milk cooler longer.
One issue that was unexpected according to Tim Mast was customers keeping the bottles for other uses at their home. The day that Jim Young Reporter visited the dairy, a truck full of replacement glass milk bottles was being unloaded. Tim said that the bottles come from Canada because the kind of bottles they use are no longer made in the US.
Unloading a shipment of glass milk bottles
