Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Some of Homestead Creamery's customers have insulated boxes they purchase to store their products. The company delivers other groceries besides milk.

Eyeing the driver-side mirror, Jeff Beckner twists the steering wheel and guides the bulky refrigerated truck into a narrow slit of asphalt beside a two-story brick house. He slams the gearshift into park, slips out of the cab and walks around the back of the truck to unhinge the rear door.

The time is 6:50 a.m., and the sun hangs above the horizon like a spotlight, casting a rosy glow over the clear-cut subdivision in Botetourt County. Outside the truck, the air is still damp and frosty, and crickets chirp softly from the brush.

Before long, Beckner emerges from the truck's refrigerated compartment, blue crate in his clutch, glass milk bottles clinking.

"I've seen a whole lot of sunrises in the last three months," Beckner later says as he loops around the empty neighborhood in the butter cream-colored delivery truck.

It's been nearly two and a half decades since the last milk trucks rumbled through the Roanoke Valley, the service having given way to better refrigeration, longer-lasting milk and what was deemed at the time as the "convenience" of supermarket shopping.

But now Homestead Creamery is hoping to revive this old-time tradition and is banking on a new generation of customers, many of whom are increasingly busy and picky about where their food comes from, to buy into this budding new delivery service.

On this misty morning, Beckner, vice president of Homestead Creamery, is serving as the dairy's interim milkman and manning the grueling 12-hour shift that begins before dawn.

In June, the company launched the service as a trial run of sorts, targeting a handful of suburban neighborhoods with a door-to-door flier advertising campaign and dispatching one truck to make daily rounds.

Since then, Homestead has collected nearly 250 customers and hopes to snag roughly another 200 or so in early October when a second truck hits the road, said Beckner, who has spent the past few weeks training a new driver.

The second truck's addition to the company's delivery operation will allow Homestead Creamery to expand its service to the entire Roanoke Valley including Roanoke and the surrounding counties, Beckner said. It already serves neighborhoods in Roanoke, Franklin and Botetourt counties along with areas around Smith Mountain Lake, he said.

The 5-year-old company based in Franklin County plans to add two more trucks to its delivery fleet in the spring and hopes to serve 1,500 to 1,600 customers by next fall, he said. Deliveries arrive once a week, allowing each truck to switch off neighborhoods daily.

The service is slightly pricier than grocery store-bought milk -- customers pay a $1.50 fuel surcharge and another $1.50 bottle deposit -- but Homestead sees a growing market emerging in the valley's rapidly developing suburbia, said Homestead Creamery co-owner and third-generation dairy farmer Donnie Montgomery.

To make delivery routes profitable, Homestead needs to serve 80 to 100 customers a 10-hour day and average at least $15 per stop, said David Weinstock, a former president of the International Home Delivery Association and consultant to Homestead Creamery.

Such a business model seems unlikely to survive solely on peddling bottled milk and nostalgia, so the company has stocked each delivery truck with a mishmash of products akin to those found at the corner convenience store -- eggs, bread, coffee beans and the creamery's own brand of ice cream.

Supermarkets continue to maintain a tight hold on milk sales, Weinstock said, and even Homestead Creamery doesn't expect delivery revenue to surpass that generated by retail sales. Montgomery estimates the delivered milk accounts for about 10 percent of the company's net profit.

Rather, the door-to-door sales serves to augment sales at their storefront in Burnt Chimney and in local grocery stores, such as Kroger and Fresh Market.

It is also a way for smaller, family-run dairies that lack the advertising muscle and transportation reach of their large competitors to pinch a share of the local market, Weinstock said.

Each delivery truck bears the company's insignia, a boxy, 1960s-style milk truck encased in a red circle, and as it makes the rounds of neighborhoods, towering photographs of dairy cows on each side, it is in effect acting like a traveling billboard.

"The delivery service has actually increased the wholesale business," Beckner said, adding that the truck helps boost brand recognition. It also relieves customers of the onerous task of remembering to return the used glass milk bottles.

Robin Boston, 39-year-old mortgage consultant and customer on Beckner's route, said she was thrilled to see the Homestead milk truck making loops around her neighborhood. "When he first started," she said referring to Beckner. "I gave him like 10 bottles I forgot to return."

Once a staple of the American household, milk delivery began to fade during the 1960s and 1970s in the Roanoke Valley and other parts of the nation. Pasteurization was becoming more common, giving milk companies the ability to haul milk longer distances. As a result, wholesale prices dropped. And with fewer people home during the day, drivers were selling less milk and traveling longer distances.

One 1977 newspaper article in The Roanoke Times described milk delivery as being rapidly replaced by the "trend towards ... convenience."

"Food shoppers buy milk when they wanted," it added.

The final demise of milk delivery in the Roanoke Valley came in 1982 when Meadow Gold Dairy was the last dairy in the valley to dismantle its home delivery routes, according to newspaper clippings.

Despite Homestead Creamery's efforts to carve out a niche for this retro-service, home milk delivery now makes up a microsliver of the nation's wholesale milk sales.

Whereas it once made up a third of milk sales in the 1963, today less than one-half percent of milk is delivered to customers' doorsteps, according to a 2003 study done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's marketing service.

And that figure has budged little in the past 30 years.

"You think maybe things are taking an uptick but when you see the actual data, there's not much of a change," said John Wetterau, a spokesman for the Agricultural Marketing Service, which oversees the nation's milk order program.

Homestead Creamery is one of only two companies in Virginia offering home milk delivery. The other, Yoder Dairies, located in Virginia Beach, has home delivered milk since 1929, first as a part of a cooperative and later as an independent distributor.

Labor and fuel costs are higher than packing up a tractor-trailer load and hauling it off to a distribution center. Serving between 80 and 100 customers a day requires an immense amount of effort, said Tony Banks, a commodities expert with the Virginia Farm Bureau.

Home delivery, he said, is often more expensive and often loses the economies of scale.

"It is much cheaper for a company to only ship milk to the grocery store and only have a dozen accounts to deal with as opposed to a dozen different customers on each street," Banks said.

But Weinstock, a 23-year veteran of the milk delivery service, sees it differently. Sure, it requires expertise and a lot of hard work pulling together a crew, said Weinstock, who began his career as a milkman in Minnesota in 1976. By the time Weinstock sold the business in 1998, the operation was servicing about 2,500 homes a week.

Once the routes are built, they tend to stay built and the majority of the driving takes place traveling out to the neighborhood, he added.

"It's certainly cheaper for us to run to one neighborhood and serve 80 people than 80 people get into their cars and drive to the grocery store," Weinstock said.

For now, Homestead Creamery certainly seems to thinks so, and easing into the new service on a see-how-it-goes basis.

Wearing ankle-high hiking boots and pink candy-striped button-down shirt, Beckner rounds the neighborhoods, collecting empty bottles and depositing fresh ones in coolers or metal iceboxes placed out on doorsteps.

Along the route, he plucks checks from door jams and shoves blue order forms under rocks and ice coolers. He spends his day slipping in and out of the truck's cab where the air conditioner is cranked and the digital display to the refrigerated compartment reads minus 13 degrees.

Beckner never sees the majority of his customers, many of whom are families with small kids, and when he does they often appear at their front doors bleary-eyed and in socked feet.

As he cruises through the neighborhoods, children appear on doorsteps and dogs trot out into the yard. A lone jogger pitter-patters by pushing a baby stroller.

He tries to run a tight schedule and is constantly in motion, jogging up steps, down footpaths, climbing in and out of the truck, pausing only briefly to scribble in a white binder, and then back on the move again.

"We tell people they can set a clock for the milkman," Beckner says. And without stopping to catch his breath, Beckner is back in the driver's seat, hands planted firmly on the wheel, guiding the delivery truck backward along yet another long, winding driveway.