Episode description

Tim Joseph had no farming experience. He had never even milked a cow. In 2004, he received a fast education when sixty-four cows stepped off the trailers onto his land.

Thrown into the fire, Tim and his wife Laura started selling milk while Tim worked a full-time corporate job from home. In 2009, they went "all in", opened a storefront and transitioned to making dairy products, like yogurt and cheese. And the company started to grow..

Over a two-year span from 2011-2013, Maple Hill Creamery went from being on shelf in about 600 stores—mostly independents in the Northeast—to over 6,000 stores, including Whole Foods Market, Sprouts, Target, Walmart, Ahold, Safeway, Natural Grocers, EarthFare, and many others.

Tim is also committed to building the Maple Hill Milkshed, the community of nearly eighty 100% grass-fed dairy farms in New York. A fun, incredible success story. I had a lot of questions for Tim:

• Working from home and dairy farming on the side, how did you manage your time?
• How did you make the transition from conventional dairy to organic grass-fed dairy?
• How did you manage the fear of stepping out and doing something different?
• What’s a day like on the farm? Cow milking 101?
• Why does grass fed dairy make sense?
• What was the initial response to "grass fed dairy?
• How did you manage growth from 600 to 6000 stores?
• What were the keys to such rapid growth?
• How do you view trade shows from a P/L perspective?
• How is yogurt made? What about Greek yogurt?
• When is it time to go "all-in" with your food startup?
• What questions do you need to ask yourself?
• Will you hire robots to milk cows? (note: this is already happening!)

Selected links from the show:
Maple Hill Creamery
Pennsylvania Certified Organic
This is Maple Hill