Spotlight On: Cheese Department
Meet Team Cheese!
Mongers: Nettie, Carol, Janet, Cal, and Scott. Buyer: Shelby. Manager: Beth.
We inhabit Cheese Island, a truly unique cheese department, a hybridizing of specialty local, artisanal cheese offerings, with uncommon and hard-to-find imported cheeses and pre-packaged convenience cheeses for the everyday cheese drawer.
Nettie, Carol, and Janet have been the friendly faces on Sunday evenings for about a year now. But in fact, they have all worked in the Cheese department for more than ten years. They all have very interesting jobs outside of the Co-op, do their side hustle here, and provide a deep continuity of cheese knowledge and customer service that we find invaluable.
Scott and Cal are our anchor mongers, answering your cheese questions, helping you find that special cheese for your weekend cheese and charcuterie board, or helping you to identify that cheese you had at a friend’s house. You know—the one you can’t remember the name of, but you know it came from the Co-op, and it might have been cow’s milk, but you aren’t sure…it might have been hard, or maybe it was soft? But it was delicious! We love that game. Scott and Cal are both cheese lovers; they actually know about the products, and if they don’t know, they would love to learn.
We taste all of the cheese. It’s a perk of the job! Every wheel is slightly different, so instead of asking us what is new, ask what is tasting really good right now. And, while you’re at it, ask for samples or ask if you want a smaller piece to bring home or a larger one. We will gladly do that for you.
Shelby is our intrepid buyer. She came to the department about three and a half years ago, making the transition from the Deli to focusing on cheese, and she loves it! Like the rest of us, the cheese world was largely unknown to her, except that she knew she really liked it. Turns out cheese will bring out the inner science geek in a true turophile, and Shelby is that. She has embraced learning about all things cheese, from curating an interesting and constantly evolving display case to sourcing the best prices from our distributors to attending to our customer’s special requests. And, arguably, the most important part of the job—taking care of the cheese. It’s alive, and because of that, it has a lifespan. We have a lot of cheese, and it’s a huge job to maintain it in its best iteration. We owe it to the cheesemakers who entrust us with the end product of many months of work to take good care of it. To tell the stories.
Beth is the chief storyteller. One of our most important missions in this little department is to tell the stories of the cheesemakers and the delicious, miraculous, transformative curdled milk product they create. Who are they? Where are they located? What kind of cheese do they make? What kind of creamery are they? Are they farmsteads? Or are they bringing in milk from a local dairy farm? What methods do they use? Where do the names come from? Is it a family farm, or did they get into cheesemaking by another route? Beth loves learning the stories of the ephemeral cheeses, the extinct cheeses, the traditional, and the innovative. And in sharing the stories of the cheese and sharing and tasting the cheese with our customers, we spread the stories. The word of the curd.
We are passionate about local cheese, sustainable farming practices, and supporting and respecting tradition, and at the same time, we’re super excited by an R&D project that blows our socks off. We want to carry all of your favorite cheese, but we can’t. We don’t have the space, and we don’t have the mongor power to take proper care of too many cheeses. But what we can do is hear requests, bring in what makes sense in a way that does justice to the cheese, and also recognize that we are, at the end of the day, a grocery store with an obligation to our shareholders to also offer really good quality at a good value. We try to always have the perennial favorites like Harbison And Bayley Hazen Blue from Jasper Hill, Cabot, Grafton, and Shelburne cheddars, raw milk innovators like Parish Hill and Vermont Shepherd, alongside the basic Jarlsberg and shredded mozzarella.
We love cheese, and we love offering it to you.
Beth, Cheese Manager
