This Is What It's Like To Visit The Tillamook Creamery - Exclusive

Tillamook has become a household name, with a huge line of dairy products. The dairy company, located in Tillamook, Oregon, produces cheese, butter, yogurt, sour cream, and ice cream, and it has been doing that since 1909.

Picking up a block of Tillamook cheese or a carton of Tillamook ice cream and enjoying it at home is certainly a delicious experience on its own. What if you could take that love for Tillamook dairy products to a whole new level? Enter: the Tillamook Creamery.

The Tillamook Creamery that now welcomes countless visitors each year opened in 2018. It's a production center and a visitor center, all rolled into one, and we wanted to know more. What is the appeal of visiting the Tillamook Creamery? What makes it such a popular tourist destination, drawing people to Oregon specifically for that purpose? In an exclusive interview with Mashed, the creamery's Vice President of Brand Marketing, Kate Boltin, shared all about it.

The Tillamook Creamery experience embodies the merging of two other visitor center concepts. "When the visitor center was first open, it was a 'come look at our factory' thing, and then you can take a couple [of] samples away," said Boltin. "Then, in the '80s, they put in a true visitor center, but it was not immediately connected to the production facility." 

Now, the version that stands today is the combination of both worlds, creating an experience for guests. "The spirit of that was truly blending both worlds of where we had been and creating an experience for people to understand the end-to-end process of what it [takes] to get you your cheese and ice cream," said Boltin.

According to Boltin, the inside of the creamery is equal parts industrial and warm wood tones to create a rich space. While the atmosphere is beautiful, it's the experience of watching production and enjoying a treat or a meal that makes it that much more special.

"This is a real brand from a real place with real people who have made it," said Boltin. "You can go in and you can have lunch, you can have breakfast there, you can get your scoops of ice cream." At the same time, it serves as an educational destination for those involved in agritourism in the Pacific Northwest. With so much to offer, it has become the second most-visited place in Oregon, next to the famed Crater Lake.

Learn more about Tillamook on Instagram. You can also follow along with Jenny Slate as she hosts the Partnership for Creamier Ice Cream.