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He founded Springfield Creamery and created Nancy’s Probiotic Foods with his wife, Sue, who died in August. They had been married 65 years. Chuck Kesey was also brother to Oregon counterculture icon Ken Kesey.
Chuck Kesey, the co-founder of Springfield Creamery who helped revolutionize the American yogurt industry with live probiotics, died Thursday, Nov. 6. He was 87.
Kesey’s death comes three months after his wife, Sue Kesey, died in August. The two were married for nearly 65 years and together, they built Springfield Creamery from a small local milk-bottling operation in 1960 into a nationally recognized producer of cultured dairy foods.
The company announcement of Kesey’s death called him a “scientist, storyteller, and dreamer.” He was also brother to Oregon author and counterculture icon Ken Kesey.
“Our Dad never stopped exploring — his mind was interested in so many pieces of life,” his daughter Sheryl Kesey Thompson said in a news release announcing her father’s death. “He believed that real, healthy food could make people’s lives better. That was his true calling, and I think that is what he was most pleased to have had an impact on. He would often remind us, ‘We are not making breakfast. We are making health food, and we are saving lives here.’”
Chuck Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, in 1938, and moved to Springfield as a child with his family. His father, Fred, managed the Eugene Farmers Creamery.
He studied dairy science at Oregon State University in the 1950s, and met Sue, studying business and secretarial sciences, on a blind date. They married in 1960, soon after graduation, and opened Springfield Creamery.
“The early years were humble: Chuck, Sue, some friends and a milk truck, bottling glass jugs for local schools and homes,” according to the news release. “But the two were partners in every sense — Sue the organizer and strategist, Chuck the inventive ‘mad scientist’ with a wide, warm grin who was always trying something new.”
The couple grew Springfield Creamery into a major player in the natural foods movement. The company’s products are sold under the Nancy’s Probiotic Foods brand, and they are available at major retailers nationwide, including Whole Foods Market, Natural Grocers, Sprouts, Kroger, Safeway and Albertsons.
The Keseys were pioneers in adding probiotics to American yogurt. As Vanessa Salvia wrote for Lookout when Sue Kesey died in August:
At first, the Keseys provided milk for the Springfield School District and home deliveries of milk to local neighborhoods. In 1969, a woman named Nancy Hamren moved from San Francisco to Eugene to be the creamery’s bookkeeper. And, serendipitously, Hamren had experience making yogurt.
The creamery started making yogurt, and called it Nancy’s Yogurt. Chuck had heard about adding the probiotic L. acidophilus to yogurt for health reasons, and no other creameries were using it in their products at that time.
But the company saw hard times, too, including one episode that would become a famed piece of Lane County lore. The 1972 Veneta benefit concert with The Grateful Dead — with whom the Keseys connected through Ken Kesey’s group of Merry Pranksters — saved the creamery from financial hardship and is featured in the music documentary “Sunshine Daydream.”
That concert saved the Springfield Creamery. Fifty years later, it’s still family-owned, now co-owned by Chuck and Sue’s daughter Sheryl Kesey Thompson and son Kit Kesey.
“His legacy isn’t just in every cup of yogurt,” Kit Kesey said in the news release. “It’s in the culture of curiosity, kindness, and the commitment of doing things the right way, even if you have to strap it together. He created that culture and instilled it in all of us.”
Plans for a memorial service to celebrate Kesey’s life will be announced later.
The company announcement sharing news of Kesey’s death requested that remembrances can be made in the form of donations to the Chuck and Sue Kesey Endowed Scholarship at Oregon State University’s Department of Food Science and Technology.
