Articles
9 February 2012

A Better Cheddar

by Marie Mischel

09 February 2012—

Three years ago, Tim Welsh and Pat Ford were entrepreneurs in search of a new venture. In keeping with their desire to “get back to the earth,” they decided that, rather than build a better mousetrap, they would develop tasty Cheddar under the brand Beehive Cheese. 

            “We make marvelous cheese,” says Ford, standing in the company’s unassuming office space at the intersection of highways 84 and 89 in Uintah. From the office, a door leads to a small retail shop with coolers full of cheese and shelves of related products. Down the hall lies the heart of the operation: Two “caves” of aging cheese wheels and a room equipped with vats, a pasteurizer and other cheese-making equipment.
            Cheese experts from around the world agree with Ford’s assessment of his product: In August at the annual American Cheese Society (ACS) competition, Beehive Cheese’s “Barely Buzzed” espresso and lavender rubbed Cheddar took first place in its category. The overall competition drew a record 1,208 cheeses and cultured dairy products, entered by 200 producers in 30 states. Many on the international panel of judges received their training in such elite places as France’s M. Hervé Mons or Neal’s Yard Dairy in London.
            Phenomenal cheese is precisely the type of product that Ford and Welsh intend to produce.
            “We’re about small-batch, handcrafted cheese,” Welsh says. “The reason we got into this was we wanted to slow our pace down from what we were doing in software and real estate. Part of that was reconnecting…to simplicity and back to the earth.”
            Despite this utopian dream, the partners approached their venture with businessmen’s practicality. Welsh spent two years investing in the cheese industry. Their research led them to conclude that the market for artisan cheese is strong and getting stronger. An artisan cheese product is one made by those specially skilled in the craft, master cheese makers. These cheeses are not factory cheeses, but small batch craft cheese. Statistics reflect this fact: In 2003, Americans consumed 8.8 billion pounds of cheese, four pounds more per person than in 1994, according to a study by the California Milk Advisory Board. That study also revealed that the consumption of specialty cheeses – those that have a national annual volume of less than 40 million pounds, according to the Wisconsin Specialty Cheese Institute – grew five times faster than the consumption of total cheese consumption between 1990 and 2002.
At Beehive Cheese, these statistics are borne out by product demand: The company sells every wheel of cheese it makes and has a waiting list of orders. Last year it produced 50,000 pounds of cheese, and owners expect to increase that number this year. Their business model is to market equally among retail and wholesale distributors. Locally, Beehive Cheese is used by restaurants such as Rooster’s in Ogden, stocked in certain grocery stores and sold at farmers’ markets. It is also sold to wholesalers in San Francisco and Houston.
            “Since we started, we’ve been trying to grow very slowly and use cash-flow growth, and we’ve been pretty successful,” Welsh says. “People are always wanting us to make more cheese and to grow, but we really wanted to grow slowly so we were exposing our risk, because this is a really risky venture. We’ve been around for more than two years. I think we’ve proven our model. We’ve never made cheese that we weren’t able to sell before we wanted to sell it.”
            To achieve a quality product,    Beehive Cheese starts with milk from a Jersey herd at Wadeland South Dairy, about 10 miles from the production facility. Jersey milk is known for its high fat content. The herd isn’t fed growth hormones and the milk has a very low somatic cell count, indicating it’s “the cleanest milk around,” Ford says. “Our milk is literally two hours out of the cow when we get it.”
            The fact that the cheesemakers know the dairyman personally is part of the artisan process, Welsh says. “Our customers that we’re targeting actually care about that. So we’ll be at a farmer’s market, and people will ask, ‘Tell us about your milk. What are your cows eating?’ We can say, ‘Well, our dairy farm is located in West Ogden, which is very close to us. The feed they use is grown on 350 acres that is right next to the farm. The alfalfa is grown in the soil that reflects our product and our local flavor.’”
            The attention to quality comes at a price. “Our cheese runs anywhere from $15 to $20 a pound,” Ford says. “It’s all local, it’s all natural, it’s all done by hand. People say, ‘Why would I want to pay that much more?’ and I say, ‘Here, taste this.’ And they taste it, and I say, ‘That’s what it’s supposed to taste like. If you like it, buy it.’”
 


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