Beehive Cheese: Cheddar And Change
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- Beehive Cheese employee Dominic Donalson rubs coffee and lavender on a cheese wheel to make the popular Barely Buzzed cheddar. Employee Cherry McCombs is working next to him.
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- Wheels of Beehive Cheese’s Promontory Cheddar wait to be rubbed with various flavors at the company’s Uintah plant.
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- Tim Welsh and Pat Ford, founders of Beehive Cheese, pose in front of equipment that is no longer used since the company’s partnership with Gossner Foods started.
A lot has changed since Tim Welsh and Pat Ford founded Beehive Cheese in 2005.
Their Uintah creamery went from making 500 pounds of cheese per year to a million pounds last year, outgrowing its capacity. The local dairy that originally supplied its milk was sold for development years ago. Welsh and Ford also have made room for the next generation to run their business.
“Things change. You have to be able to adapt and adjust to that change,” Welsh said.
To adapt, Beehive is collaborating with large-scale cheesemaker Gossner Foods, headquartered in Logan. Gossner’s Heyburn, Idaho, plant now makes the cheese, using Beehive’s Promontory Cheddar recipe and Beehive’s own dedicated equipment. The cheese then comes to the Beehive plant, where employees do what Beehive is best-known for — hand-rubbing unique flavors into the cheese and letting it age. Flavors such as coffee-lavender Barely Buzzed, sea salt-and-honey-rubbed Seahive, Earl Grey-rubbed Teahive, and Red Butte Hatch Chile have netted Beehive over 150 awards from the World Cheese Awards, the American Cheese Society and Utah Cheese Awards.
The Beehive-Gossner partnership launched this summer after 18 months of planning.
No Beehive employees were laid off, said Katie Schall, Beehive’s director of marketing. Although invited, none of the cheesemakers opted to move to Idaho. Instead, they were transitioned to do cheese-rubbing and packaging at the Uintah plant.
When Welsh and Ford got started in 2005, the artisan cheese movement was just gaining traction across the country. As novices, they took a cheese-making course from Utah State University’s Western Dairy Center to get technical expertise and basic recipes to build upon.
They made their first batches of their now-classic Promontory Cheddar in 2005. It won a gold medal at the 2013 World Cheese Awards.
In 2006, they began playing with different rubs on the outside of the Promontory Cheddar.
“We thought, coffee and cream go together, so what about coffee and cheese?” Ford said.
They called their coffee-and-lavender-rubbed cheddar Barely Buzzed. It took first place in the 2007 American Cheese Society’s competition.
“That really launched us,” Ford said.
At the time, flavor-rubbed cheese was uncommon.
“We were really pioneers in that realm,” Ford said. “Now, it’s one of the largest categories in the American Cheese Society’s competition.”
Today, Barely Buzzed is still the top-selling flavor. Each 20-pound wheel of cheese is first spread with organic canola oil — chosen because it won’t go rancid during the long aging process, Schall explained. Then, the lavender/coffee powder is hand-rubbed over both sides before aging several months.
Now, Beehive Cheese is sold nationally in stores such as Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Costco and Kroger. Locally, it’s carried in Harmons, Smith’s and The Mercantile on Historic 25th Street in Ogden.
“We had to keep expanding,” Ford said. “A business is like an airplane; it has to be moving forward in order to keep going.”
But as the Uintah plant reached capacity, they had a dilemma. They watched as prominent artisan cheesemakers such as California’s Cowgirl Creamery were sold to big investors, and they didn’t want that.
“But we are getting older, we are tired, and we were in no mood to invest more capital,” Welsh said. “For the last five or six years, our kids have been running the company.”
Britton Welsh is now company president and Oliver Ford is director of sales.
“With the next generation of Beehive leadership in place, we’ve been energized to think through how to get to the next level sustainably while staying true to who we are,” Britton Welsh said. “We’ve seen what can happen when companies sell, take on too much debt or bring in investors with different goals. Our expanded partnership with Gossner Foods allows us to produce the same high-quality cheese, maintain our company culture, remain family-owned and preserve what makes us so special.”
In a press release, Gossner Foods President Kristan Earl called the partnership an “exciting opportunity,” adding “Our relationship with Beehive over the last 19 years has remained strong because we see eye to eye on quality standards and company values.”
Being known as an “artisan” cheese is one of the reasons that Beehive can command around $12-$20 per pound. According to the American Cheese Society, the term “artisan” implies that a cheese is produced primarily by hand in small batches, paying attention to the traditional cheesemaker’s art, and using as little mechanization as possible.
A million pounds of cheese a year may sound “big,” but it’s still pretty small compared to other cheese manufacturers. According to its website, Gossner produces 60 million pounds of Swiss cheese each year. The website for Tillamook County Creamery in Oregon says it produces more than 188 million pounds of cheese annually.
Tim Welsh said Beehive still qualifies as artisan “because we have developed a niche market for rubbed rind cheese, and we are still doing that by hand. Just because we are bigger now doesn’t mean we’re not artisan cheesemakers.”
