Grows up: farmstead, artisan and specialty cheesemaker are developing real markets, upgrading facilities and even partnering with the big boys

Dairy Foods, March, 2006 by David Phillips

Mateo Kehler and Jed Davis inhabit different planets in the cheese galaxy.

Kehler is a co-founder of Jasper Hill Farm, where cheese is made by hand from the milk of 35 Ayrshire cows. Davis works for Cabot/McCadam, the processing subsidiary of Agri-Mark Inc., cooperative. That operation sold $760 million worth of cheese and other dairy products in 2004. Nonetheless, 38-1b Cheddar wheels from Cabot's Montpelier, Vt. plant are traveling a couple counties over to Jasper Hill in Greensboro, where Kehler wraps them in cloth and places them on wooden shelves in an underground cheese cave. There they will age anywhere from 10 to 18 months to develop rich, complex flavors and textures.

The resulting product, Cabot's Vermont Clothbound Cheddar starts with small batches using the pasteurized milk of a single herd of Holsteins. A proprietary blend of cultures and Jasper Hill's affinage (the craft of storing and aging the cheese), results in a cheese with the complexity of raw milk Cheddar made with the milk traditional breeds.

"It's an unlikely partnership, but it's worked out extremely well," Kehler says. "Cabot is demonstrating that they are not so big that they cannot make an artisan product that can stand on its own in the best retail shops in the country, and we can get them into places they can't get to on their own."

It was Cabot who initiated the partnership after getting to know Jasper Hill through the Vermont Cheese Council.

"For 10 years or more we have attempted to make a natural rind Cheddar," says Davis, Cabot's dir. of marketing. "The biggest problem for us is that in making a natural-find Cheddar you naturally encounter some mold or mites, and we didn't want any of that anywhere near our regular cheddars.

Both men say the partnership has offered mutual benefits. It helps Jasper Hill increase its volume and broaden its portfolio (Jasper Hill markets the cheese, with both companies getting billing on the label), while the project offers Cabot deeper penetration into the lucrative and growing specialty cheese market.

The partnership with Cabot will allow Jasper Hill to grow even taster. It will begin blasting this month in order to quadruple its underground storage, and its staff will likely double this year.

Goat cheese, please

The story of what Kehler and Davis are doing may ring familiar among other American artisan cheese makers. Many are growing their sales by leaps and bounds while learning to manage supply and demand. Some are ramping up their plants and expanding affinage and storage space to meet the growing demand, and some are working with a growing number of distributors to enter new markets. Some are doing all of these things.

Jasper Hill is less than four years old. It has six full-time and two part-time employees. Its herd will soon be expanded to 45 cows. That makes it one of the larger farmstead cheese manufacturers in Vermont, but it is still quite young and quite small in comparison to the full gambit of American artisan, specialty, and farmstead cheese companies which have cropped up in all comers of the country in the past two decades. For the most part those who have been the business for more than 10 years are considered veterans, and any company with more than 20 employees has achieved some heft.

Cypress Grove Chevre, Arcata, Calif., began making and selling goats milk cheese in 1983, which makes it one of the old men of American specialty cheese. Still, its sales grew 28% in 2005.

"Yes, we are growing up," says owner Mary Keehn, when asked about her company and the broader specialty cheese market. "When we began, goat cheese was not all that popular, but over the years our sales have been growing every bit as fast as we can manage."

So last November Cypress Grove picked up stakes and moved 10 miles after building a brand new production facility that quadrupled its floor space.

"Keep in mind we are still talking 12,000 sq ft, office space included," Keehn says. "But we now have more production capacity and we have things like an automated washing machine for the cheese molds."

Cypress Grove employs 40 people (hand-made cheese is labor intensive), and while these numbers are small, the company's reputation has grown large. Cypress Grove products, including its flagship Humbolt Fog, have become synonymous with the excitement being created by American specialty cheese and the newfound interest here in goats milk and sheeps milk cheeses. The company routinely takes home a handful of medals from the annual national competition of the American Cheese Society (ACS), Louisville, Ky.

The national organization has a membership of nearly 1,000 individuals and organizations. Among them about 25% are cheesemakers from as many as 200 different companies.

ACS includes everything from the tiniest farmstead cheesemakers, who are milking six cows, to companies like Carr Valley Cheese, LaValle, Wis., a fourth-generation company with a certified master cheesemaker. Carr Valley sells bags of cheese curds right along side cave-aged sheeps milk cheese that have taken best of show at the cheese society's annual conference and competition.