What do you do with really good milk?
At the foot of Mount Fuji, the Ide family has spent 36 years answering one question: what’s the best thing you can do with good milk? Founder Yukitoshi Ide wanted to sell his own produce directly, but he knew milk on its own would never keep a farm afloat. So he started asking what else pure milk could become: first ice cream, then gelato. That search led him to Carpigiani.
The milk plant and the gelato kitchen opened at the same time. Yoghurt came next, then cheese, and the guiding rule has never changed: use and sell every drop the farm produces. Yoghurt takes the lot, while cheese leaves by-products, so the whole business is a careful balancing act.
“The question is whether Carpigiani can keep up with us.”
— Yukitoshi Ide, with a grin
The happiest cows in Japan
Ide’s long-held dream was a farm where cows aren’t tied up but wander freely, kept clean, well fed and unstressed. When cheesemaking called for Brown Swiss cows, he built a second farm for them: the Cow Resort. His logic is refreshingly plain. If you eat what your animals produce, you look after them properly, and calm, healthy animals give better milk.
Son Shunsuke Ide now oversees two main sites and around four production facilities, handling roughly 1.5 tonnes of milk a day at peak. About nine shops, mostly at expressway service areas, sell soft serve and crêpes, while a wholesale soft serve mix business brings in the profit and a logistics puzzle, because the mix has to reach customers as fresh as possible. His ambition is simple: to be the dairy that sells Japan’s best soft serve.
For Australian dairies and farm-gate producers, it’s a compelling blueprint: add value to your own milk with gelato, soft serve and yoghurt, and let the story of the farm sell the scoop.
