Tillamook Creamery is a famous cheese factory located by the Oregon Coast. It originally started as a factory that only produces cheese, but slowly expanded into other dairy related territories such as ice cream and butter. Tillamook Creamery is also open to public to visit its assembly line and offer food and related products in its visitor area. Tillamook Creamery is only about 1.5 hours West of Portland and it was recently renovated in 2018, thus we wanted to visit the newly renovated creamery.
We left Portland around 9AM in the morning and it was raining really hard outside. The rain did not stop us from going to Tillamook Creamery, but we initially wanted to head to the coast to have some fun first before heading to the creamery. So since it was raining, we just headed straight to the creamery.
The drive to the creamery was simple and easy. We got there around 10:30AM and the parking lot was not even half full. We could tell Tillamook Creamery looked so different now with a much better looking exterior and much more tourist like. As we entered the facility, the ceiling was quite high and the hallway wall has a historical timeline of the creamery.
The left side of the creamery is where the food is. This is where we could get food and ice cream. The cafeteria is much larger than before with the entire wall of glass allowing natural light to come through. The lunch hour starts at 10:45AM, and we got the classic grill cheese with tomato soup and fries. The grill cheese was not so special but did taste good. The tomato soup was extraordinary. We liked it very much. It also had cheese curd in it.
The second floor of the facility is where tourists can overlook the assembly line and see how cheese is made. From the top, we could see assembly line workers at each station doing the inspection and packaging. Most of the process are automated but still required some manual inspection.
Before we left, we went to grab ice cream. The ice cream was very creamy with some special flavors. Some people chose to grab an ice cream blend, like milk shake, but we saw people having a hard time sucking up the creamy drink due to the thickness.
Overall, the newly renovated facility is much more tourist friendly and offers a lot more things to do and look at. It is definitely a great place to go after having a fun day at the coast.