This Cheese Is Your Cheese
Carmen Licon wants us to eat more cotija. And requesón, and kefir, and paneer. Licon is the founder of the MILKulture Institute, a multidisciplinary project under the USDA’s Dairy Business Innovation Initiative that’s aimed at helping regional producers develop and promote “ethnic” and international dairy products — and getting more types of people, from more backgrounds, interested in a career in dairy.
Licon, who is also the director of Cal Poly’s Dairy Products Technology Center, sees this work as especially important in the context of current challenges facing dairy farmers around the country. The latest Census of Agriculture indicates that, while U.S. milk production rose slightly between 2017 and 2022, the number of cow dairy operations declined by nearly 40 percent. Labor shortages, too, are a constant. Meanwhile, people are drinking less milk — but they’re also eating more cheese, with per capita consumption growing steadily in recent decades.
For the small dairies that remain, innovating products and diversifying their businesses — and getting the next generation excited about keeping them going — is a priority. Could one path forward be to expand our idea of what dairy products look like?
Take “Hispanic” cheeses, the USDA term for the cheeses of Latin America. Annual consumption has more than quadrupled since the designation was first formalized in 1996; in 2022, it was close to the figure for Swiss cheese and higher than blue, brick, and muenster. Still, quality options can be lacking. “We don’t have a lot of artisanal cheesemakers making Hispanic styles,” Licon explained, noting that it is the fastest-growing category in the country. “We can do more.”
Licon was born and raised in Chihuahua, one of Mexico’s main dairy-producing states — known for cheeses like the eponymous queso Chihuahua, a smooth, melty cousin of Monterey Jack. Both sides of her family worked in the industry. “I grew up surrounded by agriculture,” she said. “So dairy products have always been very important for me, and part of my heritage.”
When she moved to California, she was impressed by how important the dairy industry was there. Still, something wasn’t quite adding up. “We have all these cultures here,” she told Ambrook Research — but when it comes to dairy, “we don’t necessarily see ourselves represented in the products that we see in the market.”
MILKulture hosts events, funds research projects, and offers grants to producers interested in making culturally specific dairy products. Dairy foods originating in the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America, especially, are slowly entering the lexicon of U.S. consumers — though cheese is produced all over the world, from chhurpi, a hard yak’s milk cheese from the Himalayas, to the Ethiopian fresh cheese called ayib. Licon has organized a series of short courses at Cal Poly covering global dairy products, including one on Hispanic and Mediterranean cheeses in October. Next year, the plan is to do one around acid-set cheese styles like paneer.
One hope is that multicultural dairy education will help dairy farmers find new ideas and new customers. Plus, inspiring and funding artisan producers can create more well-paying buyers for specialty dairy farms that may not process their milk in-house. In a larger sense, more kinds of dairy products produced in the U.S. will mean more milk being sold here, too. “Let’s assume that someone is really into making cheese, and now they want to make ice cream because they think that Hispanic ice cream is a way to go,” Licon offered. “It benefits the business that’s diversifying their portfolio, but it’s also helping farmers, because they will be buying more milk.”
***
Mauricio Travesí Salgarolo, president of the Dallas-based Mozzarella Company, can speak to the demand for a diversity of dairy products. The first product made at the company’s small factory was, as might be obvious, the one in its name — founder Paula Lambert fell in love with mozzarella while traveling in Italy. But of course, this is not the only cheese people eat in Texas. In the operation’s early years, Lambert connected with local chefs, many of whom were helping build the state’s burgeoning Southwestern and Tex-Mex dining scene. The rich tradition of Mexican cheesemaking inspired her.
It wasn’t a huge leap from mozzarella to the company’s first Mexican-style cheese, queso Oaxaca: Both are made with a similar stretched-curd (or pasta filata) process that involves kneading and pulling the cheese until it becomes pliable. That product, an early success story, was launched more than 30 years ago. From there, Salgarolo told Ambrook Research, “Paula continued to experiment.”
The team now hand-produces many other Mexican cheeses, and some that cross other cultures and cuisines. This includes caciotta, an Italian cheese, with added flavors like ancho or Mexican marigold mint. Salgarolo knows of a few other producers in Texas making artisan Mexican cheeses, but it’s a small cohort. (For context, around 30 percent of the state’s population is of Mexican ancestry.)
The Mozzarella Company does not have its own dairy operation; the cow’s milk for most of its cheeses is sourced from Dairy Farmers of America, a large national cooperative, and the goat’s milk, for products like a goat cheese wrapped in hoja santa, from LaClare Farms in Wisconsin.
LaClare also makes its own cheese, an operation that’s growing rapidly with a $10 million expansion of the LaClare Family Creamery completed in 2019. But many dairy farmers with smaller herds “choose not to make their own cheese and will sell their milk to another cheesemaker,” explained Ruth Flore, outreach advisor for the Oldways Cheese Coalition. “And that cheesemaker may be buying milk from a handful of farms.”
Artisan cheesemakers often like working with small dairies for the higher quality and better transparency they provide, with more options for sourcing from specific breeds or seeking out certain farming practices. “It’s important to know that the health of the herd is good, and that the milk has the components that a cheesemaker is looking for,” said Flore, who was also former president of the American Cheese Society. Plus, it often looks good to customers to be able to point to where your milk is coming from. “A direct conversation with the farmer — that’s what this generation now wants to be able to do,” Flore noted.
What’s in it for the dairy farmers? For one thing, artisan cheesemakers will often pay more than a farm could earn selling fluid milk in bulk, especially if they’re looking for something specific, like organic or A2 certification. Sometimes, this can make all the difference in keeping a farm in business.
Still, Flore is realistic about the idea of small farms circumventing the problems of the industry by finding the perfect cheesemaking partner. “That’s a very pristine, perfect world,” she said. “If you want to work with one farm for their milk, then you have to be able and willing to buy their milk every day, as opposed to having you buy their milk when you need it … So right there is a huge commitment, even if it’s only 20 cows.”
But these types of direct sales are not the only opportunities Licon sees for boosting dairy farmers. “Regardless of how and who is going to process the milk, the fact that we have a higher offering of products — that makes more milk usage,” Licon said. “Volume is also important, especially in California, because we have very big dairies. So the more volume they can get into products, it’s better for everyone.”
***
Of course, there is also opportunity for farmers in doing value-added products in-house — itself a huge commitment. Chapel’s Country Creamery, in Maryland, makes both paneer and queso fresco; Brush Creek Creamery in Idaho has won awards for its marinated labneh (strained and preserved in oil, Levantine-style). In Washington, Ferndale Farmstead co-owner Nidia Hernandez nods to her Mexican heritage with a new line of cheeses called Familia del Norte, producing cotija, queso asadero, queso Oaxaca, and more.
Much of Oldways Cheese Coalition’s work centers around supporting demand for traditional products like these, especially “cheeses that center on the milk, production practices, culture, and history,” Flore explained. “You want people to know about their cultural heritage,” — especially in a time when finding people interested in cheesemaking is “like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
For Karin Eide, owner of Spring Hill Farmstead Goat Cheese in California’s Humboldt County, the connection between dairy and heritage was only natural. “My mama was from Chihuahua,” she explained, “so she is my inspiration on all the goats’ names here” — Bonita, Guadalupe, and Pepita among them. These Mexican roots also inspired her to branch out from the classic soft goat cheeses she started her business with. Eide has tried adapting many Mexican cheese styles, and also started making the goat-milk caramel called cajeta, which she said she’s finally perfected.
Getting here took time: Eide got started in cheese 20 years ago, while working an off-farm job. “It was very expensive, and still is, to be a microdairy and cheese plant licensed with the state of California,” she told Ambrook Research. But by 2019, she was able to retire from that job, build her current creamery, and commit to cheese full-time. “My dream was to make cheese for my community,” she said — “and that is what I do.”
In the end, one of the goals for MILKulture is to inspire others to do the same. The program has helped arrange student internships — not just at hands-on dairy operations, but also in fields from engineering to communications, a multidisciplinary approach that Licon hopes will help broaden conceptions of what a career in dairy can mean. Students have also led research on DEI initiatives in dairy workplaces. Short courses offer technical assistance in both Spanish and English, and the plan is to expand to other languages as well; Licon is working on getting simultaneous translation for MILKulture’s new public webinar series.
“It’s a way to celebrate this diversity, but also, it’s a call to action,” Licon said of her work trying to thread the needle between culinary heritage, product innovation, recruitment, and resilience in the dairy industry. Perhaps, by showing people there’s room for their culture in this field, everyone can benefit, in one way or another.
“It’s not gonna solve all the problems, I know,” Licon said. “But we’ll start somewhere.”
Hannah Walhout is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She has previously been on staff at FoodPrint, Travel + Leisure, and Food & Wine, and now covers food, culture, design, sustainability, and the ways they collide for various print and digital publications.