Creameries Making Cheese for a Cause

Boxcarr Handmade Cheese

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, the country watched as food supply chains from flour to milk to meat shuddered and buckled. 

The crisis hit the artisan cheese world, too, as producers large and small saw business from chefs and distributors evaporate overnight and farmers’ markets canceled. And in late March, a glut of fluid milk that would normally go to school lunches and foodservice customers saw regional processors asking already-strapped dairy farmers across the country to dump their product. Despite the empty dairy cases at supermarkets across the United States, there was simply no place for it to go. 

But some cheesemakers looked at the crisis hitting their own businesses and saw an opportunity to help out their dairy farmer neighbors, get creamery staff back to work, and feed their communities in the process.

Lively Run Dairy in Interlaken, New York, the oldest continually operating dairy in the United States, produces award-winning goat’s milk and mixed-milk cheeses. As the pandemic hit in mid-March, the business did its best to pilot to online retail while managing faltering cash flow and keeping up its commitments to its three supplier farms as sales plunged and space in their aging caves filled up. Meanwhile, neighboring dairies began dumping milk that processors wouldn’t or couldn’t store or sell. 

The creamery’s management team hatched a plan: they’d raise money to purchase milk from local suppliers at a premium, then donate it to local food banks that were experiencing unprecedented levels of need due to the pandemic. 

Boxcarr Supporting Our Farmers Cheese

They met their $20,000 goal on the first day and a reach goal of $40,000 in the first week. Now, the campaign—which is still going—has raised more than $48,000, which has paid for the production of batches of chevre, cheddar curds, and other quick-turnaround cheeses to be distributed to several food banks around the Finger Lakes. Now, they have their sights set on something bigger. 

“We saw how quickly people responded to the GoFundMe and the support we got from the community,” said second-generation cheesemaker Pete Messmer. “As Lively Run has been affected by this, so have a lot of other cheesemakers. So what can we do?” Messmer is working on creating a nonprofit organization that would manage funds to coordinate a similar initiative among cheesemakers and dairy farmers across New York State. 

“My next step is trying to coordinate everything so that we can get other cheesemakers involved because there’s way more surplus milk than my small cheese operation can possibly deal with,” Messmer said. “There’s no reason we can’t replicate this everywhere.” 

Cheesemakers in other parts of the country have piloted similar initiatives on their own—some though the crowdfunding model, while others are self-financed. At Boxcarr Handmade Cheese in Cedar Grove, North Carolina, siblings Samantha and Austin Genke saw a 70 percent drop in business almost overnight as orders from distributors disappeared due to COVID-19 closures—but one of their supplier dairies didn’t have a co-op where they could direct excess production. 

To keep buying that milk, the Genkes developed Supporting Our Farmers Cheese, a smooth, accessible mozzarella-like variety made with yogurt cultures. They chose the recipe based on feedback from local food banks, who didn’t have much use for soft, stinky bloomy rinds and robiolas the creamery is known for. 

“I’m in [the cheese room] all the time, breaking my back and making cheese for people who can afford thirty dollars a pound for robiola,” Genke says. “It feels so different to be hunched over the vat making cheese that is feeding more people than your normal customers.” 

To date, they’ve donated around 7,000 pounds of the product, largely paid for out of their own pocket, and are hoping to make Supporting Our Farmers Cheese—and donations to food banks—a part of their post-COVID-19 product line. (You can donate to help cover the milk and labor costs to produce the cheese here.) 

The challenge, Genke says, will be figuring out how to pay for it, as profits even during business-as-usual wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of milk and production of a donated cheese. For now, the Genkes are hoping to supply their cheese to one of the USDA Farmers to Families food box grantees, who are charged with sourcing and distributing free food packages stocked with local farm products. 

Other initiatives, like that of Beehive Cheese in Uintah, Utah, have helped local dairies and creameries alike weather weeks of potentially ruinous uncertainty as farmers and producers adjust to a new normal. The creamery, known for its aged cheddars coated in unique rubs like espresso and lavender or black tea leaves, also saw a steep drop in sales from its distributor and wholesale customers in March due to the pandemic. Their facility was operating at just 25 percent capacity, while nearby dairy farms were forced to dump milk because there was nowhere for it to go. 

“We had a supply, we had the capacity, and people were losing jobs,” says Beehive president Britton Welsh. “The only thing we could do as cheesemakers was to use that capacity.” Unable to cover the cost of the milk and the labor to make the cheese, Beehive launched Project Promontory, a crowdfunding campaign that would cover the costs to produce two batches of Promontory, its base cheddar, for donation to the Utah Food Bank. 

The campaign blew past its goal of raising $12,000 in just 24 hours. As of the end of the campaign on June 12, Beehive had raised more than $30,000—enough to make 8,100 pounds of cheese destined to feed 4,050 Utahn families. 

While Project Promontory was churning away, Dairy West, the milk marketing group for dairy farmers in Utah and Idaho, had been inspired to launch Curds + Kindness, their own initiative to keep excess milk from going to waste, and asked Beehive and other dairy processors in the region to help out. The creamery purchased milk from local farmers at a good price, then Dairy West bought back the cheese at cost to donate to food banks and pantries around the region. 

“It’s been an incredible blessing, and our vats are on all day, every day,” Welsh said. “We were honored to make cheese for them.” And now, three months into the pandemic, he said, local dairies have been able to balance their supply. That means Project Promontory will conclude with a final donation to the Utah food bank, and Beehive will return to something like business as usual. 

“Maybe not business as usual,” Welsh says. “A new normal.”