{"id":33002,"date":"2018-01-23T10:00:59","date_gmt":"2018-01-23T15:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/?p=33002"},"modified":"2018-06-26T22:46:01","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T02:46:01","slug":"planet-cheese-avalanche-cheese-company-closes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/planet-cheese-avalanche-cheese-company-closes\/","title":{"rendered":"Planet Cheese: Calling it Quits"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Planet
\nPlanet Cheese<\/strong><\/a> is a weekly blog devoted to everything cheese: products, people, places, news, and views. James Beard Award-winning journalist Janet Fletcher writes <\/em>Planet Cheese from her home in Napa Valley. Janet is the author of <\/em>Cheese & Wine, <\/em>Cheese & Beer, and <\/em>The Cheese Course and an occasional contributor to <\/em>culture<\/strong><\/a>. Visit <\/em>janetfletcher.com<\/a> to sign up for <\/em>Planet Cheese and view Janet\u2019s current schedule of cheese appreciation classes.<\/em><\/p>\n
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I<\/span>’m sad  when any American cheesemaker shuts the doors, but especially someone as talented, spunky and ambitious as Wendy Mitchell. Mitchell\u2019s ten-year-old Avalanche Cheese Company<\/a>, in Colorado, won a heap of blue ribbons for its goat cheeses. Mitchell had an impressive record in business. What on earth happened?<\/p>\n

I met Mitchell several years ago at an American Cheese Society<\/a> conference. We had Dallas in common (my hometown, her college town).  She told me she had pictured herself working on Wall Street after college, in a suit and heels, but instead she started a chain of burrito restaurants in Houston. Selling that successful enterprise allowed her to move to Aspen and\u2026retire? Heck, no. She wanted to make goat cheese.<\/p>\n

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Starting with 130 acres in rural Paonia and 50 dairy goats, Mitchell quickly began making award-winning cheeses. The months she had spent interning with top British cheesemakers were paying off. She couldn\u2019t keep up with demand for her Cabra Blanca<\/a>, an aged goat tomme; Goat Cheddar; and Midnight Blue. The best cheese shops and restaurants wanted them. The farm expanded to 220 goats.<\/p>\n

But this past fall, Mitchell acknowledged that the venture wasn\u2019t penciling out and was never going to. In a frank and poignant letter in the Aspen Times<\/a>, she wrote about the near-impossibility of making a profit if you wanted to pay employees a living wage, treat livestock humanely and stay small. She didn\u2019t gripe about the cost of regulations, as many cheesemakers do. And she doesn\u2019t regret the experience. But she did tell me in a phone call that \u201cthe only negative takeaway\u201d was a sense that the people who talk about wanting sustainable food aren\u2019t willing to pay what it costs.<\/p>\n

With 200 goats, a cheesemaker can produce roughly 200 pounds of cheese a day. (Depends on the cheese, but that\u2019s ballpark.) So perhaps, during the 10 months each year that she made cheese, Mitchell grossed $3,000 a day. Deduct the cost of labor, insurance, equipment and its maintenance, vet bills, feed, utilities, packaging, transportation (milk had to be trucked from the farm to the creamery), marketing\u2026I\u2019m missing things but you get the picture. There\u2019s not enough left.<\/p>\n

Getting bigger would have helped the bottom line but at the expense of humane animal husbandry, says Mitchell. Or, she noted wryly, if she had only had more children\u2014 free labor\u2014things might have worked.<\/p>\n

The goats have been sold, the farm is for sale and Mitchell is concentrating on her other businesses\u2014Meat & Cheese<\/a>, a restaurant, and Hooch, a cocktail bar, both in Aspen.<\/p>\n

Her tale left me wondering about the future of farmstead goat-cheese production in the U.S. For insights, I asked Mary Keehn of Cypress Grove<\/a>, Allison Hooper of Vermont Creamery<\/a> and Veronica Baetje of Baetje Farms<\/a> \u2014all leading goat-cheese makers\u2014to comment on Mitchell\u2019s plight and whether there\u2019s a profitable way forward for small producers. You can read their provocative replies here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photographed by Jim Paussa<\/i><\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\"Planet<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Planet Cheese is a weekly blog devoted to everything cheese: products, people, places, news, and views. James Beard Award-winning journalist Janet Fletcher writes Planet Cheese from her home in Napa Valley. Janet is the author of Cheese & Wine, Cheese & Beer, and The Cheese Course and an occasional contributor to culture. Visit janetfletcher.com to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":33008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[1120,2087,2278,1131,1132,2279],"coauthors":[305],"class_list":["post-33002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-artisan-cheese","tag-cheese","tag-colorado","tag-janet-fletcher","tag-planet-cheese","tag-small-business"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPlanet Cheese: Calling it Quits - culture: the word on cheese<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Last fall, award-winning Avalanche Cheese Company in Colorado announced they were shuttering the doors permanently. 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