About the Dairy
TUNaWERTH Creamery is the kind of operation where you can’t separate the barn from the business — because these days, they’re the same building.
The name itself carries the family’s history. TUNaWERTH is the old medieval name for Ternaard, a small town in the Netherlands and the de Boer family’s original home. Peter and Anita de Boer immigrated to the United States in May 1995 with their four children, bringing generations of Dutch dairying and cheesemaking knowledge with them. They started a dairy in 2010, and grew it into a full creamery in June 2012 — built on the same Dutch cheese and dairy traditions the family had always known.
Jessica is a third-generation dairy farmer in her own right. Her grandmother milked. Her dad milked. Now she does. She grew up around cows the way some people grow up around the family bakery or the family hardware store — it was just what her people did. She met her husband, Tjeerd de Boer, when they were both teenagers, moving in the same small-town dairy circles, though she had no idea at the time that his family also ran a creamery. That came later, along with a part-time job bottling and helping out, squeezed in around raising five kids. Tjeerd, for his part, has been milking cows and working alongside his parents since the dairy’s earliest days in 2010.
For years, the dairy and the creamery operated in two different places. The dairy moved from Rochester to Oakville in December 2020, after outgrowing the space it had there. The creamery, though, stayed behind in Tenino — which meant every batch of milk had to make the drive between the two before it could become the cheese, yogurt, and low-pasteurized milk the creamery is known for. That finally changed in August 2024, when Peter and Anita began easing into retirement and the family made the call to bring the creamery to Oakville too, consolidating everything onto one farm for the first time. Walls came down, equipment was moved, and — after what Jessica describes as an insane few weeks of building — the whole operation, cows and creamery alike, came together under one roof.
That move happened alongside a second shift: after teaching Jessica the recipes and the rhythms of the business for years, Anita and Peter were ready to step back and let the next generation — Jessica and Tjeerd — take the wheel. Jessica describes it less as a handoff and more as a slow fade — these days, she only calls with a question she truly can’t figure out on her own. The values that built TUNaWERTH haven’t changed with the transition; the family intends to keep it a family business for years to come.
Practices
What sets TUNaWERTH apart today is that it does almost everything itself, start to finish. Rather than shipping raw milk out to be processed and priced by someone else, the farm pasteurizes and bottles its own milk, makes its own cheese, and manages its own deliveries — no middleman, no waiting on someone else’s truck. It’s more work, but it means the product going out the door is entirely theirs, made the way they want to make it.
It’s still very much a family affair. Tjeerd handles the milking, just as he has since the dairy began. Lindsay comes in a few days a week to help with bottling, freeing Jessica up for cheesemaking and the dozens of other things a small creamery needs done. And the kids are part of it too — running the little on-farm store, learning customer service, in and out of the creamery the way kids are in and out of any family business that also happens to be home.
That same product now reaches tables well beyond Oakville — a rotating list of independent grocers and co-ops from Tacoma to Seattle, and right here in the SW Washington Food Hub’s weekly Harvest Box lineup, where TUNaWERTH’s cheese and dairy make regular Tuesday deliveries at the hub.
It’s a family that’s been at this since 1995, and a creamery built on traditions carried over from the Netherlands — still small, still hands-on, and with no plans to slow down anytime soon.
Address: 1059 S Bank Rd, Oakville, WA 98568
Phone: (564) 204-6232
