Dairy Foods Magazine named Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA) Processor of the Year in its December 2005 issue. Tillamook is a well known premium brand and the number two brand of natural chunk cheese after Kraft. The award criteria are based on excellence in four areas:  - Financial and management success
- Market leadership (including new product development, marketing and innovations that spur the industry)
- Industry Service
- Commitment to quality
TCCA has demonstrated its excellence by successfully managing dramatic growth while maintaining high quality production. The original Tillamook, Oregon plant had a major upgrade and installed automation in 1991 to reach a capacity of 160,000 lbs of cheese per day. To meet national demand, Tillamook brought its Columbia River Processing facility in Boardman, Oregon online in 2001 and doubled capacity. The Boardman plant is now undergoing further expansion so that by 2007, TCCA will have total cheese capacity of 190 million pounds per year. During this expansion, TCCA maintained the consistent quality that has established Tillamook as a premium national brand. Their slogan on consistency, “One Recipe, 100 years,” has meant using SPC and NWA Quality Analyst to help maintain that consistency. “We use Quality Analyst to track the flavor and product characteristics such as butterfat, moisture and protein in Tillamook cheese. We carefully track both our process stability and our capability to meet specs so that we can maintain Tillamook’s consistent quality,” says Bil Luth, VP of Quality. Quality Analyst is also used to monitor product weights and to control the variation from in house targets for portion and cost control and to meet regulatory label weight requirements. Besides tracking its own products, TCCA uses SPC for supply chain management to monitor licensed product manufactured for the co-op such as yogurt or Tillamook product sent out and converted such as packaged shredded cheese. The checks are on both standard control samples and samples taken from retail shelves. Consumer satisfaction is also closely tracked. Says Luth, “Our customer’s satisfaction each and every time is our final and most important quality parameter.” | 
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