Springfield Creamery’s ‘good origin story’ in Eugene

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Sue and Chuck Kesey first opened the Springfield Creamery in 1960 when they were newlyweds fresh out of Oregon State University.

Now Sheryl Kesey Thompson is proud to help run the business. “It’s a good origin story,” she said.

By the late 1960s, Chuck wanted to share the knowledge he picked up at OSU about probiotic benefits to make a cultured dairy product. It was a new employee who not only was very helpful for the next 44 years, but she became iconic for the Springfield Creamery.

“Nancy Hamren came to work for us at Springfield Creamery as our bookkeeper, and she had experience making yogurt with her grandmother in their home kitchen,” Sheryl told KOIN 6 News.

Back then yogurt came in glass jars and customers would call Nancy to order more.

“She would say, ‘Springfield Creamery, this is Nancy.’ And then pretty soon they started asking for that, Nancy’s yogurt, so very organic, that name occurred,” Sheryl said. “And so they continued to develop products and everything that was developed and still is here in our building under the Nancy’s name, has a probiotic in it. She was invaluable to the success of the creamery and remains a very good friend and a big champion for the creamery today.”

More recently is the addition of kid-friendly Nancy’s organic yogurt pouches.

“Kind of going back to what the overall, overarching goal that my parents have always had is that they want to get as healthy food, probiotic food, into as many people as possible,” she said.

Some of the youngest family members got to help with research and development.

“The beauty of the launching of that product is that my son, who’s a third generation, my son Blake, he’s our chief innovation officer, so he developed the product here,” Sheryl said. “We have a full fourth generation of young kids in our family, and they were our taste testers and our graphic critics, and I think we even did some Zoom calls and what do you think about this? And how is that tasting to you? So it was fun.”

Springfield Creamery is surrounded by evergreen trees her dad planted 40 years ago. She’s proud of the Oregon roots for this business with yogurts that are on many hospital trays across the US.

In the next Northwest Grown, we’ll reveal the connection between the Grateful Dead and the Springfield Creamery.

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