Udderly Delicious - News about us

What time did you get up this morning? 6 o'clock? 7? Or maybe you slept to a delicious 7:30. So consider that Jeff Milling of Annadale was up and on the road before dawn for a workday that will stretch more than 16 hours, doing something he will tell you he never, ever imagined himself doing: Delivering milk.

When Milling was growing up in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn 42 years ago, his family got fresh bottled milk delivered straight to their doorstep from the neighborhood milkman, like most other families on his block.

"I knew when he'd be coming because I'd hear the bottles clanging," Milling recalled last Monday, as he rattled around Grasmere in his refrigerated milk truck making deliveries, with me in tow.

"Growing up with that, I just thought it was the coolest thing. I looked at that milkman the way kids I deliver to look at me. I come up the walk and the kids will say, "Mommy, the milkman is here!" When people ask me what I do, and I tell them I have a milk delivery truck, they think it's great."

Not too many professions inspire that kind of reverence these days. Reporters? Nope. Lawyers? No way. Teachers? Not always. Presidents? Not any longer.

But being a milkman is golden. It's mom and apple pie. The bottles clanging, the lid of the metal milk box snapping shut... then opening again to reveal ice cold bottles, wet and glistening, with stuff so good inside as to make you want to stand right there, peel off a bottle cap and take a long, slow drink.

It was with that sense of nostalgia, not to mention marketing acumen, that Milling, who holds a bachelor's degree in business from Brooklyn College, chose to leave the world of advertising six years ago to start up Udderly Delicious, a one-man operation based out of his house.

"I decided I wanted to get out of what I was doing and get into a route-type thing," explained Milling, the father of two. "I wanted to be able to make my own hours, to be in control. Also, I like dealing with people. I looked into a couple of different things, and then I remembered that as a kid I used to get bottled milk. I went online and did some research. I figured out what it would take and what I would need, and then I got started.

"People aren't aware that you can get glass-bottled milk delivered home," said Milling. "The Half-gallon bottles are my best seller. The Milk is fresher and creamier and it stays colder and lasts longer.

"Which is one reason why Milling's milk truck sports the logo "Bottled Milk is Back."

With Woodstock-generation shoulder-length hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Milling looks like he could get this supply of milk from Max Yasgur's dairy instead of the Long Island dairy he drives out to at 4 a.m. every Monday and Thursday, rain or shine, in sickness and in health.

Unlike doctors, who no longer make house calls, Milling does. You may not have gotten your mail delivered during Hurricane Floyd last month, but if you were one of Milling's 300 Staten Island customers, you got your milk delivered - not to mention your butter and your eggs, or one of the other specialty products Milling recently added to his repertoire.

"It took me the whole day and night to get everybody, but I got to everybody," Milling said. "People are surprised to see me on Christmas Day, but if that's when they're supposed to get their milk delivered then that's when they get it. I work in every kind of weather, even the big storms. I've never missed a day of deliveries, even if it took me forever."

Vacations have been reduced to weekend family fishing getaways. Milling keeps his own books. His wife, Sharon, a social worker and an artist, is designing Udderly Delicious T-shirts and they've taken to prowling flea markets in search of cow tchotchkes, from refrigerator magnets to mailboxes to a black-and-white-cow-spotted blanket he keeps with him in the truck. His parents recently gave him a cow ice cream scoop that moos.

True to his profession, Milling personally drinks a glass of milk in the morning and one at night before he goes to bed.

"It's hard work, but its exercise too," Milling said, as he idled his truck outside a house to make a delivery to three fast-growing, milk-drinking boys, "I make a nice living from this business. And it's not something anyone can take away from me. I built it from the ground up."

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