Portland — Your visit to the Tillamook Cheese Factory is about to change — big time.
The Tillamook County Creamery Association, which operates the factory, unveiled plans Saturday for a “complete redesign and rebuild” of the visitors center, in spring 2017.
The new 38,500-square-foot facility will be nearly 50 percent bigger than the old one, designed to accommodate 1.3 million annual visitors with a larger caf?, additional indoor and outdoor seating, a new gift shop, improved parking lot and an “enhanced” ice cream counter.
The factory itself will remain as is, with the construction going on all around it.
“This has been something that’s kind of been in the works for a while,” Tori Harms, spokeswoman for the creamery association, said. “While you can’t build a facility large enough that there will never be an ice cream line in the summer, I think visitors will find that the new building will be a much more enjoyable experience.”
The plans call for the visitors center to close from about March 2017 through summer 2018 for construction, though a temporary visitors center — with food, ice cream and merchandise — will open on an adjacent section of the property.
While more and more people visit each year, the cheese factory’s visitors center has been a little tough to navigate.
Lines for ice cream bleed into separate lines for cheese samples, which often stretch out to the stairs leading up to the factory viewpoint, where there’s a second ice cream line. The old gift shop is overshadowed by the sales area for dairy products, found over by the caf? seating, which people often ignore for concrete planters outside. Parking is generally a nightmare.
The rebuild is “an opportunity to enhance all of those experiences,” Harms explained.
When the new visitors center opens, it will also come with an enhanced viewing area of the factory floor, a small theater and a rentable event space, in addition to an interactive research and development work space, where Tillamook plans to facilitate focus groups on new products and flavors.
Since it opened, the factory has been a popular tourist attraction and cherished destination for generations of Oregonians. The free factory tour has always been the main attraction.
Nan Devlin, tourism director for Tillamook County, said the changes are welcome in the community, continuing a long-lasting relationship between Tillamook the town and Tillamook the cheese factory.
