KALONA

Every night of my childhood and adolescence, milk was the beverage Mom provided with the evening meal. That milk provided the calcium and protein needed for adequate bone growth and muscle building wasn’t something she had to learn in nursing school; every mom knew that.

Later in life, when I became a runner, a container of milk was again provided at the finish line of most races, usually chocolate. Containing a near-perfect balance of protein and carbohydrates, I came to rely on it as a post-run recovery drink. I didn’t need a Ph.D. in nutrition or exercise science to discover this; every runner knew that.

Human beings have been drinking cow’s milk for about 10,000 years. We never needed complex laboratory experiments or genetic testing to tell us whether we should or shouldn’t be doing this.

Now we live in a world where we have those tools. And those tools have suggested that maybe we should be more selective about the milk we drink.

When Tonia Poole shared with me a handful of details about a world-class cheddar cheese with roots in Kalona last December, I had no idea the Kalona Chamber director was leading me into a deep dive into the study of milk caseins, amino acids and genetic variants in cows, but that is where I ended up. And interestingly, this came around in large part to an Amishman named Eldon T. Miller, who has spent his life helping Kalona farmers make a sustainable living from eggs and dairy.

“The reason for getting started with A2A2 milk is we had some farmers, organic farmers, that were producing organic milk for the creamery up here, and that was fine,” Miller told me on a February day when he dropped by the office. “They were doing a great job, but to broaden our marketing and maybe bring some extra revenue in for the farmer, they opted to set up a small co-op with a few farmers together to do the A2A2 milk, and we had six farms that had their cows tested and got rid of all the cows that were not A2A2.”

I won’t get too science-y on you here, but the protein in cow’s milk is about 80% caseins, of which there are four types; and the beta-casein comes in two variants, A1 and A2. Most cows’ milk contains both A1 and A2 caseins, but if you choose the right breed (like Guernsey) and then do some selective breeding, you can get a cow that produces only A2 caseins and produces calves that do the same.

Why would we care about this? Well, as it turns out, pretty much everyone can drink milk from an A2-only cow without digestive issues. And that’s kind of a big deal from a marketing standpoint, because 65% of the adult population worldwide is lactose intolerant.

Research into this A1-A2 distinction began back in the 1990s in New Zealand. A2A2 milk first showed up in grocery stores there in 2003. Since then, its started to become available in other parts of the world as people learn more about the health benefits of A2A2 milk.

The SFOF Co-op of Kalona, for which Miller serves as executive director and sons Clifford and Toby general managers, brought A2A2 milk to Iowa – including to Hy-Vee stores – but it didn’t take off.

“About three or four months into Hy-Vee, they said, ‘We have to sell three cases per store per week for it to be worthwhile.’ And it wasn’t at that point. Not enough people knew about A2A2,” Miller said.

Thus Miller had two tasks in front of him: educate consumers about the benefits of A2A2 milk, and figure out what to do with excess production.

The chief benefit of A2A2 milk is that most anyone can easily digest it. After that the science is less conclusive. Many studies have been conducted using laboratory mice and rabbits, but the results aren’t always consistent, and they often haven’t been replicated in humans, although it’s possible this is thanks to the design or duration of the studies. But it appears that A2A2 milk increases antioxidant activity and decreases inflammation in the body, both of which are good things from a health standpoint.

If Miller can get the word out about the advantages of A2A2 milk, he can increase the market and profitability of the organic milk produced in Kalona. But until that happens, he has a lot of milk to move some other way.

“It’s always a problem when you’re doing milk processing to come up with your supply and demand meeting exactly,” he said. “We ended up with an oversupply, because we had six producers, so we had some overrun of milk. So I went to my friend there at Milton Creamery and asked him, ‘Would you make cheese with an overrun of our milk?’”

Milton Creamery, located in Milton, Iowa, about 75 miles south of Kalona, is a busy place, perhaps inclined to say no to producing a new cheese out of the blue. But friendship won the day, and the creamery accepted the extra A2A2 milk from SFOF Co-op, paired it with a new recipe, and created a cheddar cheese.

Now interestingly, researchers found A2A2 milk good at many things, but cheesemaking was not one of them. That A2 beta-casein is less hydrophobic and more soluble than the A1 beta-casein, so it doesn’t like to coagulate and the curd produced isn’t as firm.

Tell that to Milton Creamery.

Tell that to the American Cheese Society.

Tell that to International Cheese & Diary.

Apparently none of these folks got the memo, because the Kalona Heritage Old Style Cheddar Cheese made in Milton from Kalona A2A2 milk not only turned out just fine, it placed third nationally in the Cheddar category in 2023 and second in 2024. Then it won first place internationally in the Mild Cheddar Cheese category in 2024.

Kalona’s excess A2A2 milk produced a cheese that is one of the best cheddars in the world.

It’s not like there wasn’t any competition. In Minneapolis in 2023, there may have been 90 other entries, Miller estimates. In Great Britian in 2024, there were over 5,500 entries.

“The contest was in Europe,” Miller said, still marveling. “They’ve got some wonderful cheesemakers in Europe.”

For an Iowa cheesemaker to place even in the national contest is striking; only four Iowa cheeses, two from Milton Creamery and two from Prairie Farms Dairy, placed in 2024, as compared to 95 Wisconsin cheeses. These awards are a serious achievement.

So you may be thinking, Yay, mission accomplished. Kalona’s A2A2 milk has found its destination as an award-winning cheese. But not so fast.

It’s one thing to make a cheese. It’s quite another to sell it. The co-op now had 100,000 pounds of cheese on hand, and 100 cows producing still more milk.

The sales team now has a job to do: inform consumers about the benefits of A2A2 dairy products, fill out the product line, and create a brand and label that appeals to consumers so they easily recognize the co-op’s products on grocery store shelves.

That work is underway, as is producing cheese with a new cheesemaker, this time one that is certified organic so that distinction can go on the label as well. New labels are printing, and the co-op’s products are arriving on shelves at JW’s Foods and Stringtown Grocery in Kalona, as well as New Pioneer in Iowa City.

While the market for A2A2 products in Iowa is being developed, there is already a market at Dekalb Farmers Market, a grocery store in Decatur, Georgia.

“They’ve been a good customer of ours for over 15 years. We got started with them when I was still in Farmers Hen House and also [Farmers Creamery] up here,” Miller said. “They’ve been buying a semi load of dairy products from us every week, really, for the past 15 years or better. It’s one of the largest grocery stores I’ve ever seen.”

Miller says his team is currently working with a sales broker to get Kalona’s A2A2 products into the New England states, but Iowa remains an important market to crack.

“We need to get our milk into more of the grocery stores in Iowa, and that’s our challenge,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that could benefit from this kind of milk.”

Looking at the research, I suspect all of us could benefit from A2A2 milk. I encourage you to seek out milk and cheese with ‘A2A2’ prominently on the label at local stores and find out for yourself.