The Covid pandemic is devastating cheesemakers around the country. No restaurants, no foodservice, no sales. But as the owners of Beehive Cheese in Utah and Lively Run Dairy in New York watched their revenue plummet last month, they independently hatched the same plan. Both creameries had empty cheese vats. Both had idle cheesemakers. Their milk suppliers—small family farms—were about to dump milk. If they couldn’t make cheese to sell, they would make it to donate.

Pat Ford, co-owner of Beehive Cheese, which makes the popular coffee-coated Barely Buzzed, said that the creamery has lost 75 percent of its business. One distributor not only stopped placing orders but told him they wouldn’t accept a pallet of cheese in transit.

I understood why restaurant sales had cratered. But given that people are eating at home, I didn’t get why grocery stores weren’t ordering specialty cheese like Barely Buzzed for their cheese counters. Ford elaborated for me:

“All the cheesemongers were pulled into the center of the store to help stock. They were so busy stocking shelves they weren’t ordering as routinely,” says Ford, “and their cases went to pot. They have basically shut down their specialty cheese counters.”

Grocery stores are struggling to keep everyday cheese in stock, says Ford. They’re selling mountains of four-pound blocks of Tillamook, but they have stopped buying whole wheels of more costly specialty cheese because they don’t have the labor to break them down.

“We did not want to lay off employees,” says Ford. “Half of them are family and the other half are ‘adopted’ family. We had 30 employees cleaning all day just to keep them busy. They cleaned, and cleaned again, and cleaned again so we could at least give them 75 percent of their pay. Then we thought: Why not make cheese and give it away? We can support our dairy so they’re not dumping milk. We can keep our employees busy and support our community.”

Beehive launched a crowd-funding campaign to make two batches of Promontory, the company’s signature Cheddar. They reached their dollar goal in less than 24 hours, so they raised it. Then raised it again, and again. As of this writing, they have received enough funding to make 6,700 pounds of Promontory—five batches—for the Utah Food Bank.

“We’re going to keep the money coming so we can keep donating,” says Ford. “The local food bank is taking every ounce we send.” Beehive is taking no profit and has been able to keep most of its 44 employees on payroll.

“My wife, sister and daughter are the only three on furlough,” says Ford. “It’s a little reverse nepotism.”

In New York’s Finger Lakes region, Pete Messmer of Lively Run Dairy was experiencing the same business collapse. Messmer worried about his own bottom line, but his bigger fear was that his milk suppliers—two goat diaries and a cow dairy—would fail.

A GoFundMe campaign quickly raised enough money for Lively Run to buy its suppliers’ milk and make cheese for the needy. The creamery has, to date, donated 550 pounds of fresh chèvre and cow’s milk curds to community food banks. “We wanted to make a product that we could get out the door immediately,” says Messmer. “The food banks need cheese now. Even a month from now is too long.”

The success of this project has fueled his ambitions, says Messmer. He and his staff are now establishing a nonprofit, Lively Run Cheese for New York, to raise money to pay other idled creameries to produce cheese for food banks. Lively Run has also pivoted its own business to more direct-to-consumer sales—which means a lot of labor-intensive cutting and wrapping instead of selling whole wheels. But it’s working.

“We were deeply scared for a couple of weeks,” says Messmer, “but we’re back up to full production. With the food bank production, we’re actually buying more milk than we used to.”

To donate to either or both of these efforts:
Beehive’s Project Promontory
Lively Run Dairy’s GoFundMe