Penn Maid has been shut down, but its memory will live on

If you’ve reached into your grocer’s dairy case lately for sour cream, you likely saw Daisy, Breakstone’s, Cabot, and Hood among the brands.

But not Penn Maid and Queenie, its lovable spokescow. Penn Maid — the dominant dairy brand in the Philadelphia area for decades, a three-generational business created in 1927 by a man selling milk in 10-gallon cans from a horse-drawn carriage in South Philadelphia — is gone.

Penn Maid’s demise at the end of 2023 came without fanfare or news release. Like other once-popular brands — Klondike’s Choco Taco and Ronzoni’s pastina come to mind — Penn Maid was shuttled and scuttled as corporate tastes changed.

Penn Maid’s founding family sold the company in 1996 to Crowley Foods, which in 2004 was acquired by HP Hood, a $3.5 billion conglomerate and one of America’s largest dairy companies. A spokesperson told The Inquirer that Hood “made the difficult decision to discontinue” the Penn Maid brand due to “declining consumer demand.”

“I had a feeling it wasn’t long for the world,” said Robin Robbins. There was a hitch in her voice as she spoke recently about Penn Maid. Her paternal grandfather, Harry Goldberg, was that long-ago milk vendor who — at the urging of his wife, Blanche — shifted to cultured dairy products like sour cream and cottage cheese and found his fortune. Robbins said Goldberg adored his Russian-born wife, whom he called Queenie.

For decades, nearly half of the sour cream sold in Philadelphia-area supermarkets was Penn Maid, which also controlled enormous chunks of the cottage cheese, yogurt, and dairy-based dip markets.

The company’s first logo was a girl wearing a bonnet, reflecting the brand name. In the 1950s, Queenie the cow’s cartoon visage — named for Harry’s wife — began decorating Penn Maid’s clear glass sour cream jars, creating an iconic piece of Philadelphia lore.

When the jars were empty, customers washed them out and upcycled them as drinking glasses. For generations, kitchen cabinets from Newfield to New Hope were packed with tumblers depicting Queenie ice skating, or skiing, or shopping. Penn Maid created commemoratives for the Philadelphia sports teams, too. Drop one on the floor? No worries. Sweep it up, buy another jar, and bake a sour cream pound cake.

Today, the jars — which sell on eBay for $4 and up — conjure up instant nostalgia. “When I think of Penn Maid, I think of baked potatoes covered in their sour cream,” said Ray Koob, the longtime WMMR-FM disc jockey.

“I remember the cow on Penn Maid label as a detail from my childhood summertime dinner table,” said Dan Elliott, who grew up in Wayne. “Grilled burgers, dogs, Herr’s ripple potato chips, Penn Maid French onion dip, iced teas, and watermelon.”

“Breakstone’s didn’t compare,” said Serena Rosen of Cherry Hill, whose neighbor’s dad was a Penn Maid driver-salesman. “We had dairy once a week.” Bananas and sour cream were her parents’ go-to combo.

Even as packaging shifted to lighter, cheaper plastic in the late 1980s and the glass jars were discontinued, Queenie remained in Penn Maid’s marketing. By then, Harry’s son Ray had bought the business from his brother Jack, and his children Rick and Robin later joined him.

Growing up in the business brought Robbins close to her father, whom she called by his first name, but only in the office. Every other night for years, he would drive 45 minutes from their home in Penn Valley to the plant in Northeast Philadelphia to start the sour cream. “My dad was doing the 2 a.m. shift up until the time I was probably 11,” said Robbins, 59. He later trained someone to do it.

Robbins, who has a business degree from the Wharton School, led Penn Maid’s sales and marketing. In addition to caring for Queenie, she oversaw quality control. “Everything that came off the production line, that’s what my lunch would be,” she said. “I would just sit in the cafeteria and just start sampling the dips and the sour cream and the yogurts and the cottage cheese. And I don’t eat very much of it anymore because I had enough for a lifetime.”

She also discovered an uncomfortable family trait: “We all had lactose intolerances,” she said, enjoying the irony. “My dad had no idea until I told him I had lactose intolerance. And he was like, what does that mean? He was like, ‘Oh, I think I have that, too.’”

Penn Maid, which employed more than 250 people, was “like being in a small business that was a big family,” she said. “Multigenerations worked there. You were always going to picnics, holiday parties, celebrations, funerals.”

But like so many family businesses, Penn Maid began feeling competitive pressure in the 1990s. Robbins said she convened a board of directors, who told the Goldbergs, “Your company’s going to be worth a lot more money to someone else than it is to you.”

In 1996, a year after Harry Goldberg died at 91, the family was faced with a choice: Gamble on a costly expansion to new cities, or sell the dairy business.

Crowley received Queenie and the Penn Maid brand, while the Goldbergs retained the cold-storage facility on the 14-acre property off Roosevelt Boulevard. Ray Goldberg, who died in 2019, retired.

Robbins stayed on after the sale, as did her assistant. Crowley milked Queenie for all she was worth. A human-size Queenie mascot was developed in June 1999 to tour supermarkets. But as years passed, Hood’s interest in the Penn Maid brand faded.

This is common among companies that have similar subsidiaries, said Tyler Milfeld, a professor at Villanova University and a veteran marketer who has worked for PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, and Hershey Co. “You don’t want to have multiple products that are cannibalizing themselves. You must decide which horse is the one that we want to try to ride in the longer term.”

While Hood’s decision may have been easy, the Goldbergs’ move to sell Penn Maid was difficult, Robbins said. “I’m not sure that if my grandfather was alive, we would have made it so quickly,” she said. “But it turned out to be a really good decision, except for consumers who are no longer seeing it. We really took care of the brand.”