The dairy cows smell. All farm animals do, of course, but these particularly pungent Holsteins have just come in from the rain. They’re huddled in open stalls inside a white wooden barn at Cella Brothers in Wallingford, Conn., swishing their tails, chewing on bales of hay, and remarking on the terrible weather with a series of disappointed moos.
Cella Brothers is a small operation, and its 75 cows are mostly free to go where they please. They’re hand-milked twice a day—a process that requires two people and takes as long as two hours each time. Since 1980, Cella has been selling its milk to Marcus Dairy, an organic dairy producer a few miles away in Danbury. Today, Elly Truesdell, the local forager for Whole Foods Market’s (WFM) Northeast region, is here to decide if any of her stores should stock it. Truesdell chats with the farmhands, inspects the milk storage tank, and laughs when a curious cow follows her around the barn.
Cheerful, slender, and blonde, 28-year-old Truesdell isn’t the type of person you’d expect to find trudging through rain-soaked cow pies. She grew up in Greenwich, Conn., went to the University of Virginia, and, after a short stint at two produce stores in Massachusetts, jumped to Whole Foods’ marketing department. “I’m what we call an ‘experientalist’ at Whole Foods, which is basically the company’s term for a foodie,” Truesdell says. “I just really love to eat.”
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