Celebrating Our Drivers This American Cheese Month
It’s American Cheese Month, a month-long celebration of arguably one of the best foods there is and the people who bring it to you! This year, we wanted to give special kudos to our delivery drivers who carry this precious cargo direct from our Creamery to your favorite store! The Shullsburg Creamery transportation fleet consists of 20 trucks that cover a 10-state area comprised of Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Indiana and upper Michigan.
For one of our drivers, Randy Goedken, this May is a very special American Cheese Month indeed for he celebrates 25 years as a driver for Shullsburg Creamery! We caught up with Randy (when he wasn’t on the road) to get an idea of what the jobs entails!
A typical day for Randy begins when most of us are sound asleep. Anywhere between 1:00AM and 3:00AM, Randy is climbing into his truck to begin his day. He runs two different two-day routes, one where he delivers within a 100-mile radius of Waterloo, Iowa, and the other where he makes stops within a 100-mile radius of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Randy covers 500-600 miles total on each route. Randy passes the time by listening to talk, news and sports radio programming as he sets out for each drop-off destination.
Along the route, Randy makes a wide variety of drop-offs, from warehouses to big box stores, and even small town grocers. Randy’s trailer is pre-loaded for him at the Shullsburg Creamery distribution center, but he must single handedly unload at each of his stops, using either an electric pallet jack or two-wheel hand cart.
Randy’s rear-liftgate trailer can hold 16 pallets, or 36,000 lbs of product. Now that’s a lot of cheese! And to make sure each and every pound of it is safe, secure and properly stored, the padlocked trailer has a temperature recording device that warehouse management staff can monitor during the route to ensure product quality and integrity by keeping cargo at the correct temperature. Of the many varieties of cheese Randy transports, his personal favorite is Shullsburg Creamery Mild Swiss, particularly for its meltability on sandwiches.
As quickly as the hours on the road seem to pass for Randy, so too have the years. He says he can’t believe it has been 25 years since he first stepped into a Shullsburg Creamery truck. Lucky for Randy and for Shullsburg Creamery, the job has been the perfect fit for the last quarter of a century – Randy enjoys his four-day work week, his dedicated route and most of all, the customers and co-workers that he’s built long-standing relationships with along his journey. Randy, who lives just outside of Dubuque with his wife, is an avid hunter and fisherman and spends his non-work days doing one or the other.
If you happen to see Randy or any of the other Shullsburg Creamery fleet drivers on their routes, give them a friendly honk to say thank you this American Cheese Month for the hard work they do delivering Shullsburg Creamery cheeses to you!
