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.
Jessica is a third-generation dairy farmer. 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 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.
For years, TUNaWERTH was split in two — a dairy farm in Rochester, and the creamery itself several miles away, near Tenino. Every batch of milk made that trip in the back of a van before it could become the cheese, yogurt, and low-pasteurized milk the creamery is known for. Then, at the start of the pandemic in 2020, the family made the call to stop driving milk back and forth and consolidate everything onto one farm. Walls came down, equipment was moved, and — after what Jessica describes as an insane four weeks of building — the whole operation, cows and creamery alike, came together under one roof in Oakville.
That move happened alongside a second shift: after teaching Jessica the recipes and the rhythms of the business for years, the creamery’s founding couple, Anita and Peter de Boer, were ready to step back and let the next generation 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.
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. Jessica’s husband handles the milking. 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 small operation with a lot riding on it, run by a family that’s done this work for generations and isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
Address: 1059 S Bank Rd, Oakville, WA 98568
Phone: (564) 204-6232
