It’s been about a year since the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Dairy Store in Filley Hall within the Food Industry Complex, which includes the old Dairy Industry building, moved from its location on the south side of the building to the north side of the complex, facing East Campus Union.

This new space offers a renovated seating area and store operations, along with a view of Legacy Plaza and Dinsdale Family Learning Commons, formerly C.Y. Thompson Library.

The new location hosted a grand reopening on March 10, 2020, the day before COVID-19 temporarily closed campus. The Dairy Store first opened as Varsity Dairy in 1917 and served all-you-can-drink milk for a nickel to anyone who brought their own glass and provided dairy products for UNL dormitories.

Over the years, it became famous for ice cream and specialty cheeses, as a way for food science students to gain valuable, real-life experiences in product development, processing and research.

By 1942, the first Husker cheese was developed in the dairy husbandry department at UNL. Today, visitors can buy Husker cheese with jalapeno; Husker-N-Gold, which is a yellow and marbled cheese mixing Husker and colby; Husker with tomato basil; and Husker with spinach and artichoke. Of course, you can also purchase sharp, smoked or New York cheddar as well.

About the ice cream

But the Dairy Store, which boasts more than 100,000 visitors annually, is most well-known for its ice cream. Even UNL legends, such as former Husker football coach and athletic director Tom Osborne, have been known to frequent the Dairy Store over the years.

The popularity perhaps comes from the variety of unique flavors of ice cream being offered. You can’t find 4-H Clover Mint just anywhere. In honor of 100th anniversary of the UNL Tractor Test laboratory on campus, students developed Tractor Test Toffee ice cream.

Visitors can’t resist flavors such as black walnut fudge, mocha madness, caramel cashew, or scarlet and cream, the store’s flagship ice cream flavor introduced in 2007 to showcase the school colors of UNL.

Other seasonal favorite flavors might include cherry almond, German chocolate, lemon custard and strawberry rhubarb, just to name a few. And of course, you can still order chocolate or vanilla.

In addition to ice cream, cheese, coffee and other food items, visitors can expect to learn a little about the state’s dairy industry, too. Thanks to educational videos streaming on monitors in a dining space just outside the south entrance to the store, visitors are treated to dairy farm tours and educational facts about dairy farmers and dairy products in the words of the farmers themselves.

Along with the mural of a gigantic cow, a wall contains assorted dairy farming facts. Customers also are encouraged to take photos in front of the mural and share them on social media using #UndeniablyDairy.

The new interactive space came about from conversations between Terry Howell, executive director of the Food Processing Center, and Kris Bousquet, executive director of the Nebraska State Dairy Association, along with Midwest Dairy and others.

“Kris and I connected about ways we could use the Dairy Store to help grow the dairy industry,” Howell says. “We talked about opportunities, and with the store moving to a new location, we wanted to have a place to highlight dairy farmers, and a place to host visitors and groups.”

He adds, “There are a lot of ways to grow the impact of the Dairy Store and use it to support students, alumni and friends of the university. It’s the front door to East Campus, an entry door to the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, IANR and university for people around the state.”

Dairy processing

Actual Dairy Store processing facilities, which have been a popular attraction for Dairy Store visitors, moved on July 1 to a new location in the Food Innovation Center on the Nebraska Innovation Campus. Howell says that between 12 and 15 food science students make the ice cream and cheese and learn about various aspects of the food processing industry during their experience working at the plant, just like always.

“Food science students are getting exposed to what it takes to work in a food plant, what quality assurance looks like, what regulatory needs look like for food processing, and how product development works in a real processing setting,” Howell says. “When they graduate, they are ideal candidates for jobs because they’ve already gotten to put their education into practice — they are pros.

“The move of dairy processing to the Food Innovation Center has been a positive thing for food science and technology students,” Howell adds. “The Food Innovation Center has five small processing facilities, including dairy processing, encompassing nearly 20,000 square feet of space. This provides for many synergistic activities among the same group of people serving with the center. All the same support staff are under one roof.”

He says that UNL’s food processing and product development facilities are among the finest in the U.S.

Learn more about the UNL Dairy Store and dairy processing online at dairystore.unl.edu.