A little more than a century ago nearly all the milk consumed in Chicago was produced within 60 miles of the city. Almost none of it came from Wisconsin. McHenry was the third largest milk-producing county in the country, and Kane was the fourth. This wasn't close to the situation in places like New York and Boston, where dairy had to be shipped in from much farther away.
Suburban sprawl has wiped away Illinois's dairy industry, but the historical disparity between Chicago and other cities struck Travis Pyykkonen when he came across it in a 1910 USDA report titled "The Milk Supply of Chicago and Washington."
Pyykkonen, then an employee benefits consultant, was becoming something of a dairy nerd. As the father of four girls (now five) he was on the lookout for good milk for his family. It wasn't easy to find. On the side he was working with some friends to develop the concept of a grocery store that would traffic in only unprocessed foods. Navigating the dairy side of the business gave him the opportunity to visit farms with cows that subsist on nothing but grass and produce raw or gently processed milk that hasn't been sapped of its proteins and active enzymes by high-temperature pasteurization.
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