A farming family, a Jersey herd, a pasteurizing plant and an ice cream freezer.

Mayfield is a milk and ice cream brand from Athens, Tennessee, a town in McMinn County in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The family’s roots there predate the dairy. The company’s history timeline says Jesse Mayfield settled in McMinn County in 1820, and Local 3 News in Chattanooga reported in July 2026 that he came to Athens from South Carolina and bought farmland that the family still looks after. The timeline says T.B. Mayfield Sr. started a small family farm in 1870, raising and selling Jersey cows.

The dairy business belongs to the next generation. The company says that in 1910 T.B. Mayfield Jr. bought a herd of Jersey cows and began selling milk to people in Athens, and Local 3 News said he delivered it to customers by horse-drawn cart. A pasteurizing plant followed. The company’s timeline dates it to 1922; Local 3 News dates it to 1920.

Ice cream arrived in 1923. The company says T.B. Jr. and his wife bought an ice cream freezer that year and named their business Mayfield Creamery, and Local 3 News reported that he made a big early sale of ice cream on the Fourth of July of that year. When the brand marked a century of ice cream, the Knoxville station WVLT reported on 28 June 2023 that Mayfield Dairy Farms was celebrating the anniversary with an afternoon event at its visitor centre in Athens on 29 June.

The middle of the century brought bigger premises and a distinctive piece of equipment. The company’s timeline says Mayfield opened a new production facility in Athens in 1950 and worked on a vacuum system, which it calls the Aro-Vac, meant to keep milk tasting fresh. Dairy Field magazine, in an October 2004 profile, dated the installation of a vacreator, which uses a vacuum to draw off flavours and odours from milk, to 1955, and quoted Scottie Mayfield saying it remained an integral part of Mayfield processing.

The family also pushed the brand beyond east Tennessee. The company says Mayfield ice cream entered the Atlanta and north Georgia markets in 1977 through the purchase of the Aristocrat Ice Cream Company. Local 3 News reported that Scottie Mayfield became president of Mayfield Dairy in 1995, taking over after his father, and described him in 2026 as the retired president. Scottie told the station that the company had always focused on the consumer rather than the store, on the view that stores would carry products that shoppers liked. His son Michael, whom the station called a fifth-generation Mayfield, runs Mayfield Farm Park.

A family company, Dean Foods and a farmer-owned cooperative.

The family sold the business in 1990. The Chicago Tribune reported on 3 January 1990 that Dean Foods Co., then based in Franklin Park, Illinois, had bought the privately held Mayfield Dairy Farms Inc. for an undisclosed amount of cash. The paper described Mayfield as a milk and ice cream producer in Athens selling in eastern Tennessee, West Virginia and northern Georgia. Howard M. Dean, Dean’s chairman and chief executive, said the purchase took Dean’s fluid milk and ice cream business into a new marketing area.

The Mayfields stayed at the head of the operation under Dean. Dairy Field reported in October 2004 that Mayfield was still managed by its founding family and had become a brand within Dean’s Southeast region. Mary Williams, the general manager and vice president of sales and marketing, told the magazine that after Dean bought the company the Athens team was still able to make its own decisions, and that consumers had worried the taste of the milk would change. She said that when Dean merged with Suiza Foods, the larger company again made clear that it wanted local management to look after the business.

The same profile described what the parent company brought. Vice president Rob Mayfield told Dairy Field that the plant had replaced its gallon fillers, half-gallon fillers and small-bottle lines one project after another over a decade, and he pointed to a new fluid milk plant in Braselton, Georgia. Scottie Mayfield said the company had once been “kind of sitting here on an island”, with no sister plant close by, and that a regional management structure in the Southeast now gave it more help. Controller Mark Cox said Dean had encouraged the company to take on private-label milk, processed differently from Mayfield milk.

The next change came in 2020. DTN/Progressive Farmer reported on 4 May 2020 that Dairy Farmers of America had finalized its purchase of a substantial portion of Dean Foods’ dairy assets as part of the Dean Foods bankruptcy. Mayfield’s company timeline lists 2020 as the year the brand was purchased by Dairy Farmers of America, and its website now describes Mayfield as a farmer-owned brand of the cooperative. Dairy Farmers of America has owned Mayfield since 2020.

Under the cooperative, the Athens plant has taken on more ice cream. The Nashville station WSMV reported on 12 February 2025 that Dairy Farmers of America had confirmed that Purity Dairy, another of its Tennessee brands, would stop making ice cream. The cooperative told the station that Purity ice cream had been made at the Athens facility, that the facility would expand production of Mayfield ice cream, and that Mayfield ice cream would replace Purity ice cream on retail shelves during 2025. The cooperative said the change did not affect the Purity brand overall or its milk plant in Nashville.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are regional American milk, dairy and ice-cream names. Dairy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family farms that still bottle under a founder’s name to labels that have passed through cooperatives, holding companies and investment firms, and a single brand can be sold in one state’s supermarkets or across much of the country.

A dairy brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a carton, a jug label or an ice-cream half-gallon seen in the chiller cabinet every week, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, closed plants or moved its processing as it grew. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its milk or ice cream is actually processed and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its cartons, labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Colour on the shelf, packaging made in the plant and a Southern treat licensed from a scoop shop.

Mayfield milk comes in a yellow jug. Dairy Field reported in October 2004 that the yellow jug arrived in 1983, its colour added to block and reflect light and protect the milk’s flavour, and the company’s own timeline gives the same year for its opaque yellow jug. The magazine described Mayfield milk as sold in yellow jugs stamped with the Mayfield logo. WVLT reported in June 2023 that shoppers may recognize the yellow jugs in their grocery stores, and quoted Donna Ballew, the visitor centre coordinator, explaining that light can travel through white or clear plastic and that the yellow jug stops it from reaching the milk.

The jugs are a product of the plant itself. Dairy Field said they were made at the Athens plant, which had run an in-plant blow-moulding operation since 1970. The magazine also noted a change of colour within the range: Mayfield had moved its chocolate milk bottles from yellow to brown because, it was told, yellow did not look right for chocolate. The same article said Mayfield had launched the Chug, a small single-serve milk bottle that began as a Dean Foods idea; Scottie Mayfield recalled that the plant’s old equipment was worn out when Dean showed the design, and that Mayfield asked to take it on.

Packaging shaped the ice cream as well. The company’s timeline credits Tom Mayfield with developing a zipper opening for an ice cream carton in 1962. Dairy Field described Mayfield’s use of the squround, a sturdier lidded ice cream carton, and tied it to Snow Cream. The magazine explained that snow cream is a Southern treat made at home from fresh snow, milk, sugar and vanilla, and that Mayfield licensed the name and recipe from the operator of a small scoop shop in North Carolina, initially selling it in bulk cans for food service. The sturdier squround made retail sales possible, the magazine said, and while most Mayfield ice cream cartons were yellow, Snow Cream had a look of its own. The company’s timeline dates the debut of Snow Cream in Mayfield markets to 2003.

The brand also has a mascot and a visitor centre. The company says Maggie the Cow has been Mayfield’s official mascot since the 1970s and became its “spokescow” for limited-edition flavours in 2015. The timeline also says Mayfield became the official ice cream of the Atlanta Braves in 2017, and that the Athens visitor centre marked its 25th anniversary in August 2019; WVLT reported in 2023 that the plant there offers tours several days a week.

For a design guide, Mayfield shows how one functional colour, chosen to keep light out of a milk jug, can become part of a regional brand’s identity, with a family name and a cow mascot carrying the rest. Compare it with Dean’s and Garelick Farms, two more American milk brands in this series. For this guide we use jug yellow, creamery cream, foothill green and chocolate-bottle brown with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mayfield’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.