Olivia McClure

In February 2024, Chuck Boeneke stood behind the Food Science Building on LSU’s campus, staring across a parking lot toward a low-slung brick structure where he’d spent much of his life: the Dairy Science Building, the longtime home of the LSU AgCenter Dairy Store.

The beloved ice cream shop and creamery equipment had been dismantled, and now, the midcentury building was surrounded by construction fencing and heavy machinery. Boeneke, a dairy science professor, watched as workers turned the place into a pile of rubble — the first step in preparing the corner of South Stadium Drive and Tower Drive for the construction of a new science building.

“It was very surreal to watch that,” Boeneke recalled. “We had a lot of history in that building. We had a lot of students come through, a lot of memories in that building.”

Boeneke — along with scores of college students — had mixed, frozen and scooped countless batches of ice cream over the years in the Dairy Science Building. In summers, they toiled in the facility’s sweltering, unair-conditioned creamery, and year-round, they tinkered with aging equipment to keep the production plant up and running. It was where Boeneke taught classes and even where he met his wife.

For all its faults, the building — and the ice cream that was churned out inside — had a way of bonding people. Boeneke can’t help but miss it.

But parting ways with the Dairy Science Building has brought new opportunities. As demolition day approached, the nearby Food Science Building was renovated. Classrooms and offices on the upper level were overhauled, and the Dairy Store set up shop downstairs in a spacious, shiny storefront and production facility.

A new home for an LSU tradition

This isn’t the first time the Dairy Store has moved.

The store traces its history back to 1904, when the Louisiana Legislature allocated $5,000 for a dairy herd and creamery on LSU’s campus, then located in downtown Baton Rouge. The creamery moved with the campus in 1925 to LSU’s present location. It first operated in the basement of Coates Hall, moving in 1929 to what is now the Nuclear Science Building.

There, employees opened a sales room that proved wildly popular. But when World War II broke out in the 1940s, declining enrollment at LSU, labor shortages and food rationing spelled trouble for the creamery, and the sales room was shuttered.

In 1955, the creamery moved into the newly constructed Dairy Science Building. The sales room returned in 1972 with a new moniker: the Dairy Store.

All along, the ice cream recipe has stayed the same. A key ingredient is milk from university-owned cows. For decades, the herd grazed on Gourrier Avenue on the outskirts of the LSU campus; that farm closed and is now the site of a pet shelter. Today, the Dairy Store sources its milk from the AgCenter’s Southeast Research Station in Franklinton, which has about 100 cows.

Boeneke oversaw the last 400-gallon run of ice cream in the old creamery, with its familiar yellow walls and slick red-orange tile floors, in October 2023. A few months later, the new store opened its doors, selling its signature 16 flavors of ice cream as well as cheese, meat and more.

The difference is “night and day,” Boeneke said.

“Just look at it,” he said, beaming with pride as he showed off the airy, modern facility. “It’s so clean. The classroom and the teaching lab are state of the art with the electronics that are in there. Downstairs in the store, we’ve got digital menu boards.”

Almost everything in the new plant is bigger and better, and Boeneke had a hand in selecting much of the specialized equipment. With an ice cream freezer double the size of the old one, Boeneke has plans for expanded production. The new milk bottle filler is faster, the air is super filtered and machinery is easier to clean.

“We don’t have any valve assemblies in the plant that have to be taken apart and manually cleaned,” Boeneke said. “Everything is directed with what we call flow panels, where there are stainless steel jumpers that look like a big elbow of pipe that we take and swing from one part to the other to direct the flow of product or cleaning solution through the plant. That saves a whole bunch of time.”

High-tech tools are at every turn in the gleaming, white-tiled creamery. But Boeneke is particularly fond of one basic feature the former facility lacked.

“The air conditioning is so nice. I’m not going to lie,” he said, laughing. “Typically, the summers were when we would make our cheese, and that was mainly because we had more labor and the students could work all day. It was hot. We had fans. We eventually bought a water-cooled air conditioner that we’d stick in there. It would help and you could work — but you were still hot.”

Education through ice cream

In May, health inspectors from 13 states crowded around equipment in the new production area while Boeneke explained the machines’ functions. They were participating in a Food and Drug Administration milk pasteurization and controls class — a training that’s essential to the inspectors’ ability to enforce complex regulations governing dairy processing and understand the intricate machinery used in the business.

Boeneke was excited about the class. Because it has up-to-date equipment and more space, the new facility is making it possible to host more educational events — something that wasn’t feasible in the old creamery.

Industry education has always been a part of the Dairy Store and the dairy science program.

“Even though we’re not as big in the state as what we once were, we do still have some dairy industry left in Louisiana,” Boeneke said. “I met with a gentleman who has a 500-cow dairy up in the northern part of the state, and he is putting in a processing plant on his farm. He wanted to use us for a model for his building and had tons of questions. We’re really one of the only school dairies in the Southeast that are left.”

Students, of course, benefit from the Dairy Store, too. It has served as the basis for many class projects for majors in everything from agriculture to business to engineering.

Students — usually about a dozen — also make up the store’s workforce. Most are not in the College of Agriculture.

“Each of them finding their own niche within the Dairy Store and how they might be able to help us improve efficiency or operations or things like that is really helpful,” said Nick Uzee, the store manager. “And they have the opportunity to find their own little piece within the greater picture of agriculture. You don’t have to graduate with a degree from the College of Agriculture to play an important part in agriculture.”

Students are the Dairy Store’s primary customer base, so their input has been handy in developing creative, limited-run flavors — a recent push Uzee has made.

“We don’t want the cabinet to get stale,” he said.

On a recent summer afternoon, Uzee, Boeneke and a pair of student workers were crafting a batch of a new flavor of ice cream: birthday cake. Laughter and lighthearted conversation about summer plans and the upcoming school year filled the room as the students, Zoey Delaney and Parker Haydel, filled cartons with the frozen confection.

“See how much fun we have?” Boeneke said with a smile.

Delaney, an animal science junior from Virginia Beach, likes the practical experience she is getting at the Dairy Store.

“I want to go into dairy production, I think, so I’m able to come here and do something that I would actually be doing for an actual job in the future,” she said.

She and Haydel, a construction management senior from Houma, both enjoy their work trips to the Southeast Research Station, where they get to interact with the dairy cattle.

Haydel was looking for an easily accessible, on-campus job when he applied to the Dairy Store. While his duties don’t have much to do with his major, he said, he appreciates the “chill” atmosphere and sees value in improving his customer service skills and broadening his horizons.

“I’m not an agriculture major, so I get to see how all that goes down,” he said. “Especially being a construction major, it’s cool. I get to learn a lot about agriculture.”

Uzee was a member of the Dairy Science Club, which runs the store on home football game days, throughout his time as an animal science student at LSU. After a stint as a 4-H agent in East Baton Rouge Parish, he was hired at the Dairy Store about two years ago. He likes his job but realizes it comes with unique responsibilities.

“It’s definitely nerve-wracking at times — just having the pressure to maintain what we’ve done for so long while also trying to be as inventive as we possibly can,” he said. “It’s that interesting balance that we’re tasked with — keeping things interesting but also respecting tradition and the past.”

He’s thankful to have a mentor like Boeneke, who’s known around the store as “Dr. Chuck.”

“He knows the product better than anyone else. If we’re trying to create a new flavor, odds are he’s made it,” Uzee said. “And if he hasn’t made it, he might have a clue on ways we can navigate around issues we might encounter.”

‘It makes them happy’

Boeneke has been part of the Dairy Store for a significant chunk of its history. He started working in the creamery in 1988 after graduating from high school.

“I was always drawn to agriculture because I was raised on a farm,” said Boeneke, who is from Pride, a community in northeastern East Baton Rouge Parish. “We had beef cows, though. But I always liked milk, I liked ice cream, things like that.”

At LSU, a couple of dairy science classes was all it took for Boeneke to realize where he belonged.

“We had our dairy farm right here on campus,” he said. “One of the classes I took was Dairy 1049. You were assigned a heifer, and you had to halter break that heifer, and then you had to learn how to groom that heifer for show. I just really liked it. So I stuck with it.”

Boeneke went on to get his master’s and doctoral degrees while working on campus, eventually shifting from creamery manager to the professorial ranks.

The job has never gotten old. After all, Boeneke gets to make ice cream for a living.

“While I’m working in the back, prepping for class or something, I can look out and see the families bringing the little kids in,” he said. “People who graduated from here years ago, they’ll come back, they’ll bring their kids. People really enjoy coming. The ice cream is really good, and it makes them happy.”

A homecoming of sorts is on the horizon: When the Our Lady of the Lake Health Interdisciplinary Science Building is complete, the Dairy Store will have a kiosk inside — and, once again, ice cream will be sold at the corner of South Stadium and Tower drives.

Oliva McClure is a writer, editor and photographer for AgCenter Communications.

This article appears in the summer 2025 edition of Louisiana Agriculture.

The LSU AgCenter Dairy Store moved to a new location in 2024, months after its longtime home on South Stadium Drive was demolished. Standing in the storefront are Nick Uzee, store manager, and Chuck Boeneke, dairy science professor. Photo by Olivia McClure

LSU dairy employees make ice cream. The LSU AgCenter Dairy Store has a long history of teaching dairy production. Photo courtesy of LSU Libraries Special Collection

LSU AgCenter Dairy Store student employees Parker Haydel, left, and Zoey Delaney fill boxes with birthday cake-flavored ice cream. Photo by Olivia McClure

LSU dairy employees make ice cream. The LSU AgCenter Dairy Store has a long history of teaching dairy production. Photo courtesy of LSU Libraries Special Collection

Health inspectors participating in an FDA milk pasteurization and control class examine equipment in the new production facility. Photo by Olivia McClure