The 1904 Butter Brand That Was Once Only Available At Safeway

If you've ever shopped in a Safeway grocery store and perused its dairy section, you've likely come across its in-store dairy brand, Lucerne Dairy Farms, which we've rated the best store-brand milk. You may be surprised to learn that the company actually predates the store it's so closely associated with. It all began in October 1904, when a group of farmers from the San Joaquin Valley in Central California (the state that today produces much of our butter) began a cooperative dairy operation they named the Lucerne Cream and Butter Company. By early the next year, they began producing dairy products from a new plant in Hanford, California. Business was good, and by the 1920s Lucerne was supplying butter across Central and Southern California, including to Safeway.

The grocery chain was also experiencing a dramatic growth spurt. Safeway began as a single grocery store called Skaggs in American Falls, Idaho, launched by M.B. Skaggs in 1915. By 1926, he had 750 stores in 10 states that he christened Safeway. In March 1929, Safeway bought Lucerne, and it soon became its in-house brand, making the company the first in the business to have its own in-house milk supply. And this was just one of many firsts for Lucerne and Safeway.

Over the years, under Safeway, the dairy brand (renamed the Lucerne Milk Company in 1945) saw lots of advances, from having the first refrigerated dairy truck on the West Coast in 1929, to being early adopters of paperboard milk cartons, to various sanitation-related and technological advances. Lucerne Dairy Farms continued to grow and today makes a long list of dairy products, from ice cream to yogurt to cheese, and pulls in more than $1 billion in annual sales (perhaps helped along by Safeway's policy of selling its eggnog all year long).

It's likely that Lucerne would have stayed a Safeway-exclusive product if not for a merger in 2015 that expanded the brand's reach. That year, Idaho-based Albertsons merged with California-based Safeway, and Lucerne Dairy Farms became Albertsons' private-label dairy company, meaning it became available in both grocery stores along with a long list of other stores owned by the company, such as Vons, Shaw's, and Tom Thumb. The dairy company may have started as a small Central Valley, California co-op selling butter, but under the ownership of Safeway and later Albertsons, it has grown into a massive dairy operation that happens to still sell a lot of butter.