The ground floor of Schaub Hall buzzes and hums with new vigor when students come back from break as thousands of gallons of raw milk are pumped through shiny, steel vats, pasteurized and prepped to be poured in glasses and over cereal, or frozen and served atop a waffle cone.
NC State’s homegrown Dairy Enterprise System, the parental figure behind the Howling Cow ice cream brand, localizes the dairy pasteurization process to campus and stocks dining halls and C-Stores with more than 20 flavors of ice cream and about 10 different liquid-based milk products.
This semester, Howling Cow plans to introduce its newest flavor, lemon wafer, to students. The cookie-inspired flavor was introduced during October’s North Carolina State Fair, where members of NC State’s Food Science Club sold almost 1,400 three-gallon tubs of Howling Cow ice cream, according to Carl Hollifield, assistant director of the Dairy Enterprise System.
Mary Graham, 20, said she was skeptical about trying the new flavor, but said it is a great addition to Howling Cow’s existing line of ice cream flavors.
“It’s the perfect amount of sweet, the perfect amount of sour,” Graham said. “It made the 40-minute wait at the fair worth it.”
Hollifield said NC State’s ability to produce such highly sought-after ice cream and milk products is thanks to its unique vertically integrated dairy processing program that cannot be found at any other university in the United States.
“We grow the crops, feed the cows, bring the raw milk over here and take it out to students as a finished, pasteurized milk product,” Hollifield said. “There are a lot of universities that make milk and ice cream, and there are a lot of universities that have farms. But, we have married the two — that is something that is different from other universities.”
Raw milk is trucked to the processing center in Schaub Hall from NC State’s dairy farm on Lake Wheeler Road. The farm is home to more than 400 cows, and about 175 are in lactation at any given time.
Hollifield said in terms of milk production, the herd’s average is about eight gallons a day per cow.
“An average cow gets milked once in the morning and once in the afternoon, each time producing about four gallons,” Hollifield said.
The milk then travels roughly a mile to Main Campus, where it is pumped directly from tanker trucks into a machine that standardizes the fat content. According to Hollifield, raw milk directly from the cow contains about 4 percent fat.
The excess fat that is removed from whole, low-fat and skim milk is used to produce ice cream.
In addition to providing milk products on campus, NC State also produces milk for North Carolina state agencies, including the Department of Corrections.
“We have had a very large Department of Corrections contract where we produce lots of 1 percent, half-pint cartons,” Hollifield said.
These types of contracts, according to Hollifield, allow for the dairy plant to collect extra fat.
“To make high-quality ice cream, it’s a balancing act within the processing plant,” Hollifield said. “Getting a lot of fluid milk moving through allows us to be able to support a 200-cow dairy and allows us to be able to make really good, awesome ice cream.”
Hollifield said ice cream production isn’t all that different from producing milk.
“It’s like milk, only we are adding sugar, skim milk powder, extra fat, stabilizer, freeze it in a continuous ice cream freezer, add flavors and inclusions — like cookie dough, chocolate swirls — and finally package it in an ice cream container,” Hollifield said.
In addition to introducing students to the lemon wafer flavor, NC State’s Dairy Enterprise System plans to open its Dairy Heritage Museum this summer.
“We want to teach children and the general public about where their agriculture products come from, and that milk doesn’t just come from a shelf at the grocery store,” Hollifield said.
