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.

“There weren’t a whole lot of options,” she says. She had gone to school in dairy science: if she wanted to stay in her field and stay on the island, she had to create her own opportunity. At the same time, if she hoped to avoid fighting the same battles against prices limited by the Hawaii Milk Act and hampered by the Jones Act’s import and export restrictions and inflated shipping costs, she knew she would have to process the milk herself.

“Milk supply chains for Hawaii differ from those in the continental United States,” wrote Claire Gupta in her 2016 article, “Dairy’s Decline and the Politics of ‘Local’ Milk in Hawaii,” published in the journal Food, Culture & Society. That’s because of the extreme distances the perishable product needs to travel. “The trajectory of milk production in Hawaii has precluded the survival of such regionalized milksheds,” Gupta continued, making it cheaper to import milk from the U.S. mainland than to source it from within the islands. The imported milk, though, unlike the local milk or most milk on the mainland, is all double-pasteurized.

Hawaii’s first commercial dairy farm opened in 1869. By the early 20th century, dairies were thriving. Gupta noted that there were as many as 86 in 1955. But the growth of production wasn’t met by the capacity of local processors, leading the state to step in and create the Hawaii Milk Act in 1967. Establishing quotas and fixing prices, the act was originally intended to ensure that enough milk was produced and at an affordable price for the dairies.