Community invited to tour newly completed Reeds Dairy production building
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IDAHO FALLS – Eighteen months after breaking ground on a new production building, Reeds Dairy is celebrating its completion.
Owner Alan Reed is hosting a ribbon-cutting and tours of the 25,000-square-foot facility at 2654 West Broadway in Idaho Falls on Friday at 2 p.m. Tours will be happening until 7 p.m. and again on Saturday until noon.
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EastIdahoNews.com took a tour of the building Thursday night with a small group of invited guests. Following the tour, Reed said the new building more than triples the space they had in the old building, which was destroyed in a fire nearly two years ago.
RELATED | Reed’s Dairy production building a total loss following fire
He tells EastIdahoNews.com it’s a blessing to have the new building completed.
“There are so many things that happened that allowed us to keep moving forward with this. The community supported us so well,” Reed says. “It moves us from a micro dairy to … a more serious dairy operation.”
The new plant, which goes into operation on Monday, has the capacity to produce 1,800 gallons of milk, cheese and ice cream an hour. That equates to about 8,000 gallons daily.
Reed says the old building only had the capacity for 780 gallons an hour.
“Today, we made cheese. We were bottling milk and chocolate milk and making ice cream with half the amount of people it would’ve taken us in the old building,” says Reed.
Reed says the additional space allows them expand into a new market providing custom mixes and other products for customers, something that’s been highly requested in recent years. They also have a new machine that bottles milk in glass bottles. He’s looking forward to expanding that market as well.
The new plant sits on the north side of the Broadway location. The old building was on the east side. It has since been demolished and replaced with additional parking for customers.
RELATED | Reed’s Dairy building destroyed in fire earlier this year is being demolished
The production building caught fire on Jan. 18, 2024 around 2:45 p.m. Firefighters battled the blaze for most of the day.
When the fire was out and firefighters cleared the scene around 9:20 p.m., the building was deemed a total loss. An investigation into the cause of the fire was inconclusive.
“There was a space heater in one of the room near where the fire started. Firefighters (initially) pointed to that because it was an easy culprit. I kept telling them, ‘It couldn’t be that because it started … near some electrical panels.’ That wall was completely gone,” Reed says. “The official declaration from the investigator is that (the cause) was undetermined.”
Reed has shed many tears over the loss of the old building and can’t say enough about the support of the community.
Over the last year and a half, Reed and his team were making cheese and ice cream in a rented warehouse near the Flying J gas station on the south side of town. Other companies helped with the cheese curds and milk bottling process.
‘That’s how it started’
Reed’s father, Roy, grew up in the house on Broadway Street next to the store that’s now an office building for the business. His father, Charlie, inherited the dairy from Roy’s grandfather, David. Roy recalls raising pigs on the property as a boy before his brother, Larry, sold them and bought dairy cows.
Roy and his brothers formed Reed Brothers Farms in 1955. The building that caught fire was the original barn where the cows were milked and that’s where neighbors started bringing their empty cans and bottles to buy milk.
“We’d fill them up. We had an old coffee can where people would put their money,” Roy told EastIdahoNews.com last year. “That’s how it started. It grew from there.”
In the 1980s, the dairy and the farm split into separate operations. Around this time, Alan came up with the idea of making ice cream. He developed a formula and invested in the equipment. It quickly became a hit.
Alan says ice cream is the company’s most popular product today.
“Everybody loves the ice cream. For us, there’s a better (profit) margin in the ice cream than milk. We sell lots and lots of it,” he says.
Going forward, Alan is looking forward to giving customers a “more consistent, quality product because of the equipment” in the new building.
“The community probably isn’t going to see much of a difference. The benefit to them is that we’re here,” says Alan. “But we can produce more. As we continue to grow, we’ll hire more people. We’ve always wanted to support the community and this gives us the ability to support it even more.”
TAKE A LOOK AT THE NEW BUILDING IN THE VIDEO ABOVE.