(Editor’s note: This is the 18th installment in a monthly series highlighting some of the region’s unsung manufacturers that make products essential to the economy and, in many cases, our way of life. See previous installments here.)
Cathryn Kennedy makes her way past one of the barns at Wright’s Dairy Farm Inc., pointing to some of the 200 members of the production team that one could argue have the most crucial jobs in the business.
The group she’s pointing out is taking their annual vacation, she says, two to three months off the clock, time allotted to them “just to hang out and be a cow.”
Yes, these are cows, and their job is to produce milk.
“We like to talk about our cows like they’re employees,” said Kennedy, food operations manager at Wright’s.
Taking time off or not, the 200 four-legged “employees” are part of an intricate operation at the 400-acre North Smithfield institution where farmhands feed and milk cows, pasteurize milk, bottling it or making it into ice cream. Others mind the store at the farm, baking pastries and decorating cakes.
These processes all date back decades, if not more than a century when founders George and Leonna Wright kept about 12 cows and a small number of other farm animals and started producing and selling milk in 1914 with daily deliveries.
Though family farming remains a cornerstone of the business, Kennedy, a fifth-generation member of the Wright family, credits the survival of the business and growth to a forward-thinking mindset.
“How we can be 1% better every day is definitely a big mentality we have here,” Kennedy said. “We try not to just be like, ‘We did it that way for a hundred years, and we’ll continue doing it that way.’ We always are looking at [it] as, ‘Why are we doing it like that, and how can we do it better?’ ”
In the mid-1900s, for instance, Kennedy’s grandparents realized that more people wanted to buy their own groceries, and they shut down the delivery service to set up the farm store.
And in later years, other changes were integrated into the business model. In 1970, Kennedy’s grandmother, Claire Wright, applied her culinary skills to the farm and began the tradition of selling baked goods in addition to dairy products.
Today, the one-time small farming operation has gradually expanded to span around 400 acres, split about evenly between owned and rented or leased land. Meanwhile, Wright’s has nearly doubled its year-round worker base in the past 15 years or so, employing about 115 people year-round and adding seasonal workers during the summer.
The business also split from Wright’s Farm Corp. – founded in tandem with the dairy farm but now known for serving family-style chicken dinners – when current owners Frank and Joyce Galleshaw purchased that side of the business in 1972.
The Wright family maintains a strong presence at the dairy. Kennedy’s mother, Ellen Puccetti, currently helms the business as CEO, and eight family members work in the business.
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WHERE IT STARTS:
Cathryn Kennedy, food operations manager at Wright’s Dairy Farm Inc., walks through a cow barn at the North Smithfield farm. As many as 200 cows produce the milk that farm employees process, pasteurize and either churn into ice cream or bottle. The products are sold at numerous local stores or at the store at the farm or a company-owned
ice cream shop in Providence.
PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
‘HARD COMMERCIALLY’
As Rhode Island’s only “cow to cone” ice cream manufacturer, the business can churn out around 40,000 dairy products during a busy week, ranging from staples such as regular milk and vanilla ice cream to popular creations such as coffee milk, chocolate milk and black raspberry Oreo ice cream. On the bakery side, it might sell another 20,000 units, from custom-made wedding cakes to the brownies, pastries and other sweets sold at the store counter.
Wright’s is holding its own in a difficult environment.
The business is one of six remaining dairy farms in the Ocean State, according to Rhode Island Farm Bureau Federation Inc. In just the past three months, three dairy farms in Rhode Island have shuttered, says Maggie Cole, an administrative assistant and chair of the bureau’s young farmers and ranchers program.
“Dairy across the nation is kind of a declining industry,” Cole said. “It’s hard commercially. … And making a living on a check alone, the price that farmers are paid is just not meeting the bills for what it costs to produce milk. Then in Rhode Island specifically, utility costs are so much.”
Cole knows this challenge well. Her family’s own dairy farm, EMMA Acres in Exeter, was among the Rhode Island farms to recently close its commercial dairy operations.
The latest closures are part of the steady decline in dairy farms over the years, Cole says, with occasional waves such as the one that’s occurred over the past few months. A similar cluster of closures took place about seven years ago, she says.
Nationally, numbers are also plunging. The American Farm Bureau Federation says that more than half of U.S. commercial dairy operations have shuttered since 2003, with just under 32,000 of these businesses remaining as of 2021.
Small farms that have survived, such as Wright’s, tend to process their own milk, Cole says. In Rhode Island, four of the six surviving farms oversee their own milk production. But this process requires intense labor, Cole says, with cows requiring milking at least twice a day.
As the industry shifts, Wright’s has dabbled in automation in recent years and continues to weigh how to best balance new technology with traditional farm labor.
In one of the cow barns, for instance, a robot that Kennedy compares to a giant automated Roomba vacuum whirs to life and begins circling the enclosure, stirring the cow feed along the ground to keep the mix of ingredients such as hay, corn and greens feeling fresh and varied for the cows.
“The cows are kind of like kids with trail mix that has chocolate in it,” Kennedy said. “They’re going to go after the little bits that they like the best. … And what this little robot does is just go along and push the feed up, and sort of remix it together.”
Employees used to have to carry out this task manually every few hours.
Some dairy farms are also moving to robotics for the essential but labor-intensive task of milking. Cows can approach these machines for milking at any time, Kennedy says, freeing labor that usually takes place in Wright’s milking parlors. The farm hasn’t milked by hand since the 1950s but still requires workers to run its milking machines. But Wright’s leadership is still investigating how automatic technology would impact the business, Kennedy says.
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GOING WITH THE FLOW:
Wright’s Dairy employees Jack Laughlin, left, and Daniel Sanches, oversee the filling station, one of the last steps before the company’s milk jugs are ready to ship. Wright’s has been able to thrive in part because it handles its own processing.
PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
WHOLESALE EFFORT
The changes go beyond tech.
Since 2018, Kennedy has spearheaded Wright’s expansion in the wholesale market, as the rising popularity of nondairy milk products such as almond and oat milk forced the dairy to increase ways to reach customers regularly.
The farm also opened a year-round ice cream shop, The Wright Scoop, at Farm Fresh Rhode Island in Providence in 2022, and operates two seasonal, trailer-style scoop shops in North Smithfield and Warren. Several local stores, including Li’l General Store in North Smithfield and Four Town Farm in Seekonk, also sell Wright’s ice cream cartons and ice cream sandwiches.
But most of the business’s wholesale activity comes through milk, the farm’s original business staple. Wright’s now sells its milk jugs through at least 30 wholesale customers in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, including Urban Greens, Knead Donuts, Hawes Fine Foods and Quality Fruitland.
All pasteurization and bottling takes place on-site at Wright’s in North Smithfield, where the business’s production facilities can pasteurize about 350 gallons of milk per hour. Workers also add flavor to select milk in this process.
In a week, the business typically processes and bottles about 7,000 gallons of milk and heavy cream – and last year, the farm secured a $425,600 grant from the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center to expand its production capabilities.
Ice cream churning, meanwhile, now takes place at the Wright’s Providence creamery – a welcome change, Kennedy noted, as the farm in North Smithfield had no dedicated space for ice cream churning. Instead, workers had to make space where they could in the bakery.
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PREP WORK: Kendall Arena, Wright’s department manager, applies cream frosting to bakery items in the farm’s “cream room.” The farm also sells baked goods on-site.
PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
That task became increasingly difficult as ice cream production grew, Kennedy says. Wright’s rate of production has increased even more since opening the Providence location, with ice cream sales up by about 20%.
The business’s main revenue source will remain in direct-to-customer sales through its main storefront and secondary locations, Kennedy says, although she’s always on the lookout for new wholesale customers to ensure that this line of business stays strong.
She declined to reveal sales figures.
Kennedy first started working at Wright’s years ago as a teenager. And while initially planning to pursue a different career path, she maintained an interest in farming and food production, studying sustainable agriculture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and later working for Farm Fresh Rhode Island.
When her uncle, David Roberts, stepped down from overseeing the business’s dairy production in 2015, it didn’t hurt that Kennedy had always loved ice cream.
“We needed someone to run our dairy plant, and I’d always wanted to have an ice cream business,” Kennedy said. “I wasn’t thinking of taking over the family business, but … that was kind of the perfect role to start in.”
While Kennedy didn’t initially expect to become deeply involved with the family business, she says she’s struck her own balance in the dynamic.
“You have to draw some boundaries and be willing to stick to them,” Kennedy said. “Knowing that if something happens … it is your family and they’re going to have your back. That’s never something that I have to worry about.”
