Seattle’s Smith Brothers has lasted a century by focusing on relationships

In 2024, nobody in Seattle needs a milkman. 

We’ve got refrigeration and pasteurization that give milk a shelf life of 21 days. Grocery and corner stores are everywhere. And in an age when you can order groceries to your house with your phone, the image of a bow-tied milkman setting a glass bottle on your doorstep almost seems too quaint to be true.

“I meet a lot of random people being like, ‘You guys are still out here?’” said Shaun Martindale, a delivery driver for Smith Brothers Farms, parking his cow-printed truck outside a customer’s house on Queen Anne last month. 

Much has changed since 1920, when Smith Brothers founder Ben Smith bought a cow in West Seattle and started selling milk in his neighborhood. Seattle’s population has more than doubled, for one. As technological advances have changed the world, Smith Brothers has pivoted their business model more than once. But a focus on personal service and human connection has helped the company survive for 104 years. 

On a recent delivery in his refrigerated truck, Martindale scanned his tablet to confirm an order then loaded up a plastic crate with milk, juice, yogurt, bread and eggs, checking the eggs for broken shells. In a flash, he’d already unloaded the crate into the white Smith Brother’s box on the front porch, sprinting back to the truck. Some stops take longer: One customer was a pediatrician, whom Martindale would ask for advice after the birth of his first son. 

Martindale is one of nearly 70 men and women who deliver milk for Smith Brothers these days (although Martindale jokes that he’s also a wildlife wrangler, given the creatures he’s waved off during milk runs: bear cubs, deer and raccoons). He’s been with Smith Brothers since March 2020, averaging a service time of 87 seconds per customer, knocking out up to 287 stops on a milk run covering Queen Anne, Fremont and Wallingford. 

He’s a living example of the core principle that has helped Smith Brothers weather a century of change, says Dustin Highland, Ben Smith’s great-grandson and the company’s president and CEO: “The Smith Brothers name is synonymous with friendly milkmen.”

A changing business 

Highland chuckles at the thought of his great-grandfather walking down the streets of West Seattle with a cow, but in 1920, West Seattle was a study in change. There were rolling hills and plenty of farmland, but there was also a burgeoning business district sprouting on California Avenue, with national chains like Piggly Wiggly, JC Penney and Woolworth. Seattle’s population was about 315,000, less than half today’s figure of nearly 800,000.

Smith bought a retail dairy in 1920 for $3,800, upping his one-cow operation to 18 cows with a 50-gallon-a-day milk route. By the 1970s, there were 30 Smith Brothers milkmen, and the company was steadily growing, even with more people buying milk at the supermarket. 

The dairy farm moved to Royal City in 2001, when “strict environmental regulations” made it too expensive to operate in Kent, Highland said, leaving the company headquarters on West Valley Highway. But, after the USDA made changes to exemptions that impacted midsized dairies in 2006, Smith Brothers had to make a choice, Highland said: “manage dairy farms and join a co-op, or focus on processing and distribution.”

They chose the latter, selling the dairy farm. Nowadays, Smith Brothers buys raw milk from farms in Buckley, Enumclaw, Royal City and Yakima, trucking it to their processing operation in Kent for pasteurization and packaging.

In order to survive without the dairy farm, Smith Brothers had to diversify its product line and upgrade its systems. Now they deliver a lot more than dairy products: juice, fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, bread and even cold-brew coffee.

And more has changed this century: There’s now a Smith Brothers app and an updated website. Moving away from contracting independent milkmen who owned their routes and trucks, Smith Brothers began hiring their delivery drivers about 15 years ago. Bringing staff in-house, expanding their product line and improving technology laid the groundwork for Smith Brothers to be successful when the coronavirus pandemic upended the world in 2020. 

“We went from 55,000 customers to 65,000 customers,” Martindale said. “We were swamped; Smith Brothers blew up.” 

Highland said the company grew by 50% during those early COVID days, prompting them to build a new distribution center in Federal Way. 

“Growth has slowed tremendously, but we’re still adding 1,000 customers a month,” Highland said. 

Highland said there’s customer attrition, but in a time when it would be easier to sell milk products directly to wholesale accounts (like grocery stores, restaurants or coffee shops), the company has stood by an antiquated profession.

Why do they still have milk delivery drivers? Connection.

“The deep connection with our customers, often over many generations, helped determine our path,” Highland said.

“Part of our family” 

So much gets done over screens these days that connection can feel like a rare thing. “No contact” deliveries are far more common than someone waiting around after ringing your doorbell. Still, Smith Brothers Farms is betting on their customers craving that old-school connection.

Peter Wold, 65, has seen Smith Brothers deliveries since he was a baby. Wally Good was his family’s milkman growing up, and years later, when Wold and his wife Debbie got married and settled near Wold’s parents in Normandy Park, Good was still their milkman. When Peter and Debbie’s oldest daughter turned 10, Wally’s son, Marty Good, took over the route. He now delivers to the Wolds’ three adult daughters, too.  

“Marty’s part of our family, basically,” Peter Wold said.

“He used to just walk in the door and put milk in the refrigerator,” added Debbie Wold.

For Good, doing the job right is all about showing up every day, learning the names of his customers’ kids, having dog bones in the truck, and trying not to ever give somebody a reason to quit. Above all, it’s about following his dad’s motto: “slow and easy.” 

Twelve years ago, Smith Brothers delivery drivers were still writing down orders in their books. The website wasn’t fully functional; customers couldn’t order everything that Smith Brothers sold or change their orders. Several of those kinks have been ironed out for the business as a whole, but they were never a problem for the Wolds: For years, they would just tell Good what they wanted when he came by each week. Marty Good says that tradition was a holdover from when his dad was teaching him the ropes of the milk route. 

“He had a big key ring to people’s houses, he would just open the door, go in — there were no cellphones, tablet, this was the ’70s — he’d look at the fridge and he just knew what people wanted,” said the younger Good, whose brother Terry also drives a Smith Brothers truck.

While he no longer has keys to his customers’ houses, Good still fields phone calls from people who don’t want to use the app or website for their orders. Instead of redirecting them to the customer service line or app, Good is happy to take the calls. That’s another holdover from how his dad ran the route — and another example of how deep customer connections run at Smith Brothers.