In an area famous for numerous waterfalls, finding a brown sign for a food stop is a great way to break up the scenic destinations. Being presented with several choices of cheese and chocolate, and a coffee to rinse the palette, Gallo Dairyland Cheese & Chocolate easily attracted us.
Gallo Dairyland is a working dairy, with most of the milk sent to the Dairy Farmers factory in Malanda. The remaining 10% of their milk finds its way into the Gallo cheese made on site, fresh on location of their farm.
The visit started at the cafe with the display cabinet full of cheese and the nearby cabinet full of chocolate delights. Where to start? Coffee. On this rainy day where we were wearing jumpers in Tropical North Queensland, a cup of hot coffee is where we started.
Sadly, due to COVID, cheese tasting wasn’t being offered. We had to make a selection based on what we thought would be good. With over a dozen different cheeses to choose from, we narrowed it down to a couple and took our spending budget over to the chocolate cabinet. We wished we had picked a couple more cheeses but ended up getting another Gallo Cheese stopping for lunch at Mungalli Creek Dairy and Cheesery 
the following day.
The chocolates had an even greater choice to select from. The chocolates are hand-crafted, made from Swiss couverture, tempered before use to stabilise the cocoa butter. I had to look up what couverture is – a high-quality class of chocolate with a finer texture and higher percentage of cocoa butter, better for artisan chocolate making.
Each of us chose a few flavours we wanted to try, coordinated to ensure we didn’t double up, and took them to enjoy while watching Netflix later that evening.
With cheese and chocolates in hand, we wandered around and saw the viewing rooms for the chocolatier and the cheese makers. Neither was actively working while we were there. There is no schedule we could see to watch the cheese makers or chocolatiers at work. It is possibly a luck of the draw timing thing.
We then wandered outside and had a look at the rotating milking platform. We were too early to see it in operation and needed to leave before the 3pm milking time. The rotary platform holds 42 cows, each producing 18-20 litres per day, with 250 to 400 cows milked each day. That’s around 6000+ litres of milk each day, more than enough to satisfy our teenage boys.
From the milking sheds, we headed to the animal nursery. Dodging a few protective geese, we said hello to some calves. There are a few chickens roaming freely and a few ducks scampering around in the puddles (it was still raining). We decided to pack our cheese and chocolate and make our way to the next sight to see on our tablelands tour.
