“For me, butter tastes as good as chocolate,” said Jakob Pedersen, Arla production operations engineer.

Jakob, who started working in a dairy when he was 15, knows what he’s talking about—for this dairy man, what started as an after-school job has turned into a lifelong love affair with butter.

Love and passion play a big part in the creation of your favorite Arla products. We witnessed this on a beautiful day in Denmark that we spent visiting Arla’s Holstebro Dairy.

We’ve had a lifelong love affair with butter too, eating it and cooking with it, and so the trip to the biggest butter dairy in the world had us feeling like Charlie when he visited Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. A day spent learning about butter (and cream cheese)? To us, this was the equivalent of a Golden Ticket.

There were no Oompa Loompas and there was no butter river (and that’s a good thing because had there been one, I would have pulled an Augustus Gloop and jumped right in). Instead, there were whirring machines, packs upon packs of finished products and the chance to sample freshly churned butter.

Holstebro Dairy produces 130,000 tons of butter a year. Jakob said, “If you take each pack and place them side by side, in a year we have a line around the globe.”

We slipped on our safety glasses, vests and clogs to watch Lurpak butter being made. Arla makes 97 percent of Lurpak, including all the Lurpak that is sold in the Philippines. “We always ask, is it still the best butter in the world? Lurpak has to be the best every time,” said Jakob.

It starts with cream, which comes fresh from the farms. A cooperative, Arla is owned by over 12,600 farmers who supply the company with milk. “We have 25 tons of cream coming in every hour,” said Jakob.  “Before we pump it out of the truck, we have a taste and we check the pH. If it’s not the best cream in the world, we can’t use it for Lurpak.”

“The dairy movement is all about cooperation, agreeing and making sure we all live up to very high standards,” said Arla’s Karina Bech.

To make sure the butter they are producing is up to standard, dairy men like Jakob check the quality every 20 minutes.

At Holstebro, Arla also has a dairy that produces just organic butter.

Another part of the dairy creates spreadable butter by adding rapeseed oil. The oil is specially formulated for Arla to make sure that Lurpak Spreadable tastes as close as possible to Lurpak Butter. No taste, no smell, no color, and Jakob proved it by letting us take rapeseed oil shots.

Next stop was Holstebro Cream Cheese Dairy, otherwise known as heaven. This is where buttermilk is sent after cream is churned to butter at Holstebro Butter Dairy.

Kenneth Olesen, who has been with Arla for 15 years, showed us around. He said, “Back in 1980, we had a surplus of sweet buttercream from the butter dairy so we decided to build a small cream cheese dairy to use the product from the butter dairy and that turned out to be a huge success.”

He takes pride in the fact that they use natural ingredients. “With our cream cheese, we have 100 percent natural ingredients in the products. There is a natural stabilizer in the sweet buttermilk. You won’t see that in any other dairy in the world. This is a unique cooperation with the butter dairy. We’re the only dairy in the world that can do this. We don’t need to add artificial stabilizers.”

“It’s quite unique. Everybody else adds preservatives and stabilizers in their products and we can produce one that’s 100 percent natural and can still have a shelf life of one year,” added Jens Christian Krog Nielsen, Arla’s senior general manager for the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. “We add natural flavors. It’s the real deal. It’s not artificial flavoring. When we make garlic butter, that’s real garlic that’s inside.”

In the Philippines, there are five varieties of Arla Cream Cheese available: Plain, Light, Pineapple, Herbs and Spices, and LactoFree. But that day, we got the chance to try over 20 different kinds, making us want to start a petition to ask Arla to also bring in the Barbecue Cream Cheese and Chocolate Cream Cheese (yes, they exist and they are so good!).

We have to admit, when we’re racing through supermarket and tossing products into our carts, we rarely think about the hard work that goes into them. But our trip to the dairy was an eye-opener, a chance to look at old favorites in a new way, giving us a renewed sense of appreciation for the things we take for granted, like butter and cream cheese.

Have a field trip suggestion? E-mail [email protected].