An udder world: Ecuadorean investors team up with Tar Heel cattlemen to milk more profit from new brands of dairy products.

• Author: Campbell, Spencer
• Position: PICTURE THIS

Though milk is the official state beverage, North Carolina, by and large, seems lactose intolerant, with dairy products accounting for only 1.6% of its $11.7 billion of agriculture sales in 2012. But more than a third of the 935 million pounds of milk produced in the state last year came from Iredell County, whose German and Scotch-Irish settlers were "cow people," Bob Stamey says. He's one, too, making most of his money through Statesville-based Stamey Cattle Co. Stamey and son David travel the country, buying dairy cows and then shipping them to foreign customers, primarily in Turkey, Mexico and Russia.

In the 1990s, they sold a couple hundred head to the Alarcon family, who owned Holding Tonicorp SA, a dairy producer and distributor in Guayaquil, Ecuador. (Earlier this year, a Mexican Coca-Cola bottler bought the company, which had $308 million of sales in 2012, for about $400 million.) In 2009, the Alarcons entered the U.S. market. Though this would be separate from their Ecuadorean holdings, it, too, would be vertically integrated, controlling production of ice cream and other dairy products from cow to cone. The first step was procuring milk. Fortunately, the Stameys milked about 130 Holstein, Jersey and Brown Swiss on their 405-acre spread. The families, whose patriarchs had remained friends after their first business deal, launched Longitude 80 Dairies LLC--Guayaquil is about 2,600 miles south of Statesville on the 80th meridian west--with the Alarcons as majority owners.

While the Stameys were getting into business with the Alarcons, another Iredell clan was looking to get out of the dairy business. Since 1947, the Millsaps family had run Mooresville Ice Cream Co., which started making the frozen treat downtown...