Hawaii was once a local milk mecca. On Oahu, there’s just one dairy left

Naked Cow Dairy, located just inland from Waianae on Oahu’s leeward coast, about 45 minutes from Honolulu, sits on a flat patch of land dwarfed by lush green cliffs. At the far end of the property, past the clucking and bleating, sits the creamery. It’s the key to how Naked Cow continues where no other dairy does. A few small rooms, a guava-wood smoker built from a converted restaurant display fridge with clear doors, and an aging room adapted from a 1963 freezer box truck form the cheese- and butter-making operation. “You have to recycle in Hawaii,” laughs van der Stroom, hinting at the difficulties of doing business on the island. Today, diners at 20 restaurants around the islands and shoppers as far away as Colorado buy the 600 pounds of cheese and 800 pounds of butter produced by Naked Cow each month. But the path to survival for Oahu’s last dairy required a hefty amount of bushwhacking. When van der Stroom moved to the island 25 years ago to run a different dairy, there were 17 others in operation. But one by one, they were priced out by a system in which the Legislature set milk prices that didn’t fluctuate with inflation or changing costs. At the mercy of the single processor on the island, they each gave up. When van der Stroom was handed severance pay and tasked with closing down the final dairy on the island, she looked for a way to soldier on.