Back in the mid-19th century, a young Louis C. Graeter said goodbye to small-town Indiana and moved to the big city, Cincinnati, to seek his fortune. It was there that the teenager decided to try his hand at crafting a sweet treat, ice cream, in an open-air market.

The past year brought challenges to many North American dairy processors, from tariffs threatening export sales to a growing array of dairy alternatives squeezing limited shelf space. Some dairy processors fared better than others when it came to addressing those challenges.

Throughout June, the company will donate milk for every social post that uses #GiveMilkMoney.

The second-annual Cheesefest event raised money for the Montclair History Center.

According to new research published by New York-based IBISWorld, the United States is home to more than 1,200 dairy processing businesses. With that many players in the industry, it can be difficult for one company to find ways to stand out.

The past year brought a sea of positive changes to Borden Dairy Co. The Dallas-based company welcomed a new CEO, Tony Sarsam, who boasts more than three decades of experience in the food industry at major companies that include Frito-Lay, Nestlé and PepsiCo, as well as a handful of other key executives.

Associated Milk Producers Inc. (AMPI) produces upwards of 640 million pounds of cheese, 140 million pounds of butter and 175 million pounds of powdered products each year. Despite those impressive figures, most consumers have never heard of the New Ulm, Minn. based dairy cooperative.

As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once famously noted, "Change is the only constant in life." And dairy processors certainly aren't immune to that reality. Expansions, acquisitions, divestitures, partnerships, new business and lost business bring ups and downs, large and small, to a number of individual companies in any given year. Our latest Dairy 100 rankings, based on 2017 (or latest available) revenue, reflect those changes.