Twin Brook Dairy’s partnership with Millie’s Homemade ice cream continues to be sweet
A farm off Interstate 70, and the family who owns it, are savoring a sweet taste of success from their roles in the production of sweet treats.
Twin Brook Dairy Co., a 400-acre farm in Somerset Township, is the source of milk used by Millie’s Homemade, an ice cream company with more than a dozen locations in Southwestern Pennsylvania, two in Florida and one planned for Buffalo, N.Y.
An integral aspect of this partnership – perhaps the integral aspect – is that the milk processed at the company’s production headquarters in Homestead comes from Guernsey and Jersey cows at Twin Brook, owned by partners John Marchezak and daughter Randi.
This is a family operation, in which John, who works in the fields, is complemented by his daughter, who bottles milk to sell at local markets, handles marketing, distribution and sales and virtually any other task. “It’s like any typical small farm,” she said. “You do a little of everything.”
She also works diligently at Millie’s production facility in Homestead, where Chad Townsend, co-owner of Millie’s Homemade with his wife, Lauren, “offered me space in 2020 for pasteurizing and bottling,” Randi said. She buys milk from her father, who succeeded his father at the dairy farm.
John has a herd of more than 100, most of them Guernsey cows, and she is his biggest customer. Randi was able to launch a parallel business of bottling milk to sell to local businesses. That essentially saved the farm.
She processes 650 gallons of milk a week in Homestead and sells to Millie’s, her biggest client. Randi said she pasteurizes milk “at the lowest legal temperature, 145 degrees, for 30 minutes. That preserves the quality of the milk.”
Guernseys are a tradition at Twin Brook Dairy, a breed that, she said, “don’t have the highest milk production, but provide the most quality – in nutrients and flavor.” The family also has Jerseys and Holsteins. Randi has received compliments for the flavor of the Guernsey milk.
There was a time when she broke away from her agricultural roots. Randi attended Penn State and earned a degree that put her on a career fast track. She secured a job with a large company, landed jobs in three states and moved to the West Coast.
Then . . . “I thought about farming again,” she said in a 2021 interview with the Observer-Reporter. “I decided to give this a shot, to get out of marketing before I started to make too much money and not want to leave. I moved back from California and started to work for a farm co-op.”
That led to a return to Twin Brook Farm and Dairy.
Her comeback story was similar to one her paternal grandfather, also John Marchezak, experienced a half-century earlier. Her grandfather had grown up in the Bentleyville area and, after returning from overseas in World War II, opened a dairy in the region. He purchased farmland in 1952 and raised Guernseys and opened a bottling plant about a decade later.
His farm was affected adversely by longwall mining in the 1970s, which eliminated much of the farm’s water supply. He closed the bottling plant.
For the next half-century, the Marchezaks would use the building – featuring the original porcelain bricks and a concrete floor – as a calf nursery.
In late 2020 and early 2021, Randi, her dad and anyone who could help undertook a laborious four-month renovation and cleaning of the structure and opened for business as a farm store.
Sometime in 2026, the Marchezak clan will complete a 360-degree turn from the demoralizing circumstances Randi’s grandfather went through in the ’70s. With the farm having solved its water issues, Randi plans to have an expanded bottling plant built on Twin Brook so she can increase her customer base and product line.
Randi Marchezak does not regret leaving a possibly lucrative marketing career to return to her agrarian roots. Besides, she is still in marketing – for Twin Brook.
“I didn’t realize how much I would miss it,” said of her time away from Twin Brook. “I was young and that’s how things go when you’re 18.
“I have to say that growing up on a farm is amazing.”