Kids Consulting Co. · Book 1 · Forthcoming

Coventry Creamery

Name: Coventry Creamery
Author: Nella Burgin

A Kids Consulting Co. Adventure in Cheesemaking

Emily and Ozey came to Vermont to visit family. They did not plan to spend the weekend learning exactly how cheese is made — or trying to understand why the creamery that makes it is in trouble.

Middle grade fiction STEM & manufacturing Book 1 Forthcoming

Step inside the tour Nella Burgin

Cover of Coventry Creamery by Nella Burgin

The story

It starts with a tour.

Emily likes drawing machines, mechanisms, and anything she does not fully understand yet. Ozey notices numbers: prices, quantities, waste, inventory, and value. When their uncle shows them through Coventry Creamery, both of them start asking questions.

The answers take them from the milk tanker all the way through cheddar and cottage-cheese production. But the more they understand about the creamery, the more they realize the business has a problem that cannot be solved by simply making more cheese.

Emily

She draws to understand. If she cannot work out how the pieces connect on paper, she knows she needs to look again.

Ozey

He notices what things cost, what gets wasted, what sits unused, and when the numbers do not seem to make sense.

“You definitely could not tell any of that from looking at the outside. I started drawing it.”

Inside the tour

A complete production journey.

The book treats the factory tour as part of the plot, not as background. Readers see the machinery, the sequence, the food-safety rules, the slow waiting, and the parts that only make sense after the characters have watched them happen.

01Milk delivery, sampling & acceptance

02Separation & standardization

03Pasteurization & heat recovery

04Culture, acidity & rennet

05Cutting, cooking & whey

06Cheddaring, milling & salting

07Hooping, pressing & bandaging

08Aging, turning & cheese triers

09Cutting, vacuum packing & traceability

10Cottage-cheese setting & cutting

11Cooking, washing & dressing

12Filling, sealing & cold storage

Illustrations from the book

Draw what is hard to picture.

The visual language grows out of Emily's sketchbook. Machinery and processes are shown when the reader needs more than a sentence to understand how the pieces fit together.

Line illustration of the plate heat exchanger and its connected pipes — Plate heat exchanger · the outside looks simple; the interesting part is what the plates are doing inside

Line illustration of workers stacking cheddar slabs — Cheddaring · a slow physical transformation that is much easier to understand when you can see the stages

Line illustration of workers beside the cheese mill — Milling · the shape changes again, but the cheese does not go back to being what it was

Milk tanker illustration — Milk delivery · the load is tested before the creamery accepts it

Cheddaring illustration — Small-scale production · some work is still done by hand because the economics of automation do not always make sense

What is real?

The story is fiction. The cheesemaking is built from real processes.

Different creameries use different equipment, temperatures, timing, cultures, and combinations of steps. The goal is not to pretend there is only one way to make cheese. It is to give readers one accurate, coherent process they can actually follow from beginning to end.