ARCATA, Calif. — “I feel like we have a whole new company,” says Mary Keehn, president of Cypress Grove Chèvre, a specialty goat’s milk cheese company headquartered in northern California.

Twenty-one years ago, Cypress Grove Chèvre started as a relatively simple sideline business to Keehn’s dairy goat showing enterprise. The company now has grown and evolved into a well-known player in specialty foods circles, and this past year in particular has seen a number of important changes for the company.

Among the changes are new products that will be introduced at the Summer Fancy Food Show this coming week in New York. The company is introducing two new products: Mad River Roll and EWE-F-O.

Keehn describes Mad River Roll as a 3-inch diameter ripened goat’s milk cheese log that is tangy and sharper near the rind and richer and creamier near the center. It comes in a two-pack, with each roll weighing in at about two pounds. Repack labels are available.

EWE-F-O, part of the Creamline product line, is made exclusively for Cypress Grove by an Italian company.  The sheep milk cheese has a natural rind and is granular, fragrant and slightly fruity. The firm cheese comes in a 6-pound wheel and is shaveable like a Parmesan, Keehn says.

The two new cheeses bring the company’s total product offerings, which include classic fresh Chèvre and Cypress Grove’s signature Humboldt Fog, to 12.

Beyond these two introductions, the most notable change for the company is a brand new production facility in Arcata, Calif., that is allowing the company to focus once again on new product development and additional production. At about 12,000 square feet, the new facility isn’t large by dairy industry standards. Still, it is almost four times the size of Cypress Grove’s previous location in nearby McKinleyville.

The company moved into the new facility in November, and it’s plenty big enough to try out new cheeses as well as to give Keehn an opportunity to focus on areas of the business that simply couldn’t be addressed before due to space limitations.

“What we’re doing now is catching up on management and catching up with customers,” Keehn says, explaining that long ago the company had reached capacity and couldn’t fit in any more goat milk, employees or customers.

The company now has grown to 35 employees. Recent additions include a general manager as well as a part-time employee to help the dairies that produce the milk the creamery uses to focus on best practices.

“We’re trying to take a much more active roll in milk quality and production,” says Keehn, adding that she believes high-quality milk is the No. 1 factor in making high-quality cheese.

Now that the company has the capacity to expand, a new goat dairy recently was added to the company’s producer roll, bringing it to seven dairies. In addition, other dairies will be added in time. With 18 acres at its new plant site, the company itself also may resume milking does (Keehn sold her goats in the early 1990s to focus on cheesemaking). Another option Cypress Grove’s staff is considering is raising kids for the dairies which supply the creamery with milk.

While getting involved with at least some aspect of animal husbandry is a goal, growth in this area and in cheesemaking will be controlled, Keehn says.

Keehn, who is involved in organizations that work to keep agricultural land in production, believes in providing opportunities for agriculture to continue to be a successful part of her community and in providing good jobs for her employees. Rather than growing her company, those areas have been her focus, along with the obvious focus of making high-quality cheese. Keehn believes these core company values are a large part of the company’s continued success.

“We don’t want to change who we are,” she says.

What will be critical to the company’s future success is a continued focus on quality, she says, noting that she believes as many companies grow quality often suffers. This is something that she refuses to let happen. That’s why the new plant was designed to incorporate a solid HACCP plan, with improvements for aging and storage such as five coolers instead of the one aging room they had in the old plant.

“We’re working on refining and doing a better job overall instead of huge growth,” she says. “We’ve always been known for quality, but as we grow, we really  have the opportunity to focus on it.”

Year-to-date sales growth is 25 percent over last year, and though Keehn declines to say how much cheese Cypress Grove sells, that kind of percentage growth rate for several years in a row was what led the company to build a new facility.

Keehn says she always has concentrated on meeting the commitments she has made to customers in terms of filling orders and filling them in timely manner, which ultimately required limited growth during the last few years. Now, though, the company is able to meet current customers’ demands as well as selectively say “yes” to a few new ones.

The company will be adding new products as it sees areas where there is customer need and demand, Keehn adds. For example, Mad River Roll adds a new aged cheese component to the company’s product offerings. And EWE-F-O becomes the second sheep’s milk cheese and third imported cheese the company is offering.

Cypress Grove didn’t go out looking for imports, but when the company was approached by a Dutch company about five years ago, the additions made sense because at that time Cypress Grove no longer had room to grow with its own production, Keehn adds.

While some may be surprised that a small goat’s milk cheese company would be handling imports, Keehn says the imported cheeses, which include Midnight Moon, a goat’s milk cheese aged over a year, and Lamb Chopper, a sheep’s milk cheese, fill previously unfilled niches in the market. Midnight Moon and Lamb Chopper, both Dutch cheeses, have done very well for the company, she says. Both have won awards, including Lamb Chopper being selected as Best Product of Aisle at the 2004 Winter Fancy Food Show and Midnight Moon Best New Product at the 2002 Winter Fancy Food Show.

She has high hopes for the success of EWE-F-O as well.

“I’m not seeing any other sheep’s milk cheeses like this in the U.S.,” she says.

However, in general Keehn sees many new sheep and goat’s milk cheeses on the market. She notes that during the past two decades while the company has grown from a one-woman show to a 35-employee company, the demand for — and production of — goat’s milk cheese has risen dramatically.

Keehn says that if she knew 20-some years ago what she knows today, she may not have undertaken the adventure. She is excited and pleased with where the company is today, but some of the early years were difficult and lean.

“Goat cheese was not popular. The end,” she says. “It was really tough at the beginning.”

Now the market has tons of opportunity for growth — and in some ways it’s still as difficult for new players to enter because of the depth of the competition. 

“But again, that says a lot about the capacity of the market.  Interest in specialty cheeses of all types continues to grow; buyers and consumers are more sophisticated, so it becomes more critical to do the extra things that really make a difference for them, ” Keehn says.

CMN