May 9, 2025
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Photo courtesy of Cedar Grove Cheese

AWARD-WINNING CHEESE — Cedar Grove offers a wide variety of specialty cheeses, from fresh and flavored cheese curds, to aged Cheddars, to sheep’s, goat’s and mixed-milk cheeses, and the company has won dozens of awards over the years.

Photo courtesy of Cedar Grove Cheese

LIVING MACHINE — Cedar Grove Cheese recently rebuilt and expanded its Living Machine water treatment facility, also adding a mural by artist Owen Wills that pays homage to the company’s history and ongoing dedication to the environment.

By Rena Archwamety

PLAIN, Wis. — Named for a grove of cedar trees that used to grow where the current plant is located, Cedar Grove Cheese carries on a nearly 150-year legacy as a continually operating cheese plant that has undergone many changes in production and ownership.

When Bob Wills took ownership of the factory in 1989, he transformed it from a commodity producer that supplied primarily a single customer to a specialty cheesemaker

offering a wide variety of artisan cheeses to a diversified market.

“Today, about half our production is organic cheese, and we do sheep and goat, and earlier when people were supplying water buffalo milk, we were making that too,” Wills says. “We’ve done everything from soft cheeses like Quark, Chevre and Ricotta, up to 17-year-old Cheddar and hard sheep’s milk cheeses that have won awards. Everything is a specialty in one form or another, whether it’s the milk source, or making organic or kosher.”

• Award winners

Many of Cedar Grove’s award-winning cheeses are sheep’s, goat’s or mixed-milk varieties, including Fleance, a young sheep’s milk cheese similar to a Manchego, and Donatello, a more aged sheep’s milk cheese with a rich and nutty flavor. Both Fleance and Donatello won Best in Class awards this spring at the U.S. Championship Cheese Contest.

“Donatello has won something like 15 or 16 awards in major competitions in the last 10 to 12 years,” Wills says.

Cedar Grove’s latest specialty creation is a surface-ripened sheep’s milk cheese, “So Big,” which was just introduced this spring. For the new cheese, Wills collaborated with Jennifer Brozak, owner of Bear Valley Affinage, who used to work at Cedar Grove. So Big starts with Fleance, which then is smear ripened to change the texture and flavor of the cheese.

“We had been talking about the possibility of making a smear-ripened version of some of our sheep’s milk cheese, and it turned out to be delicious. The first batch of So Big came out around January, and some of it is going to the ACS (American Cheese Society) competition,” Wills says.

He adds that So Big has an earthier flavor and is less citric than what you would get in an aged sheep’s milk cheese.

Closer to home, Cedar Grove perhaps is best known for its fresh, quality cheese curds. The company’s conventional cheese curds this spring won first place in both the plain and flavored categories at the U.S.
Championship Cheese Contest.

Wills, who had helped lobby to create the cheese curd categories at the contest, was successful this year in changing the entry process as well so that cheese curds — meant to be enjoyed as a fresh product — could be judged closer to when they were made.

Wills is pleased that cheese curds finally are receiving recognition on the national stage and being recognized for their quality.

“One of my pet peeves is that people don’t take cheese curds very seriously,” he says. “There’s a wide variety in the quality of cheese curds. There are tricks to get a little longer shelf life in terms of getting them in the market as fast as possible, and flavor variations can be added. Sometimes we make sheep milk and goat milk cheese curds.”

Cedar Grove has developed a line of organic cheese curds that includes linkage to educational information on individual farm practices. However, the rollout has been delayed due to high demand for organic cheese products, which has made it difficult to procure enough organic milk for production.

“We’re trying to get more milk, reaching out to farmers and trying to expand our milk supply. Everybody’s trying to get it,” Wills says.

• Community minded

Cedar Grove’s transition over the past 37 years from a commodity supplier to a specialty producer has been a long and sometimes challenging process, Wills recalls. Along the way, the company went through some major setbacks including having a major customer walk away without warning. Since then, Wills implemented a rule that no one customer can get more than 15% of the company’s production, which has led to diversifying styles of cheeses and types of customers.

“One of the things we do is work with buyers to customize what they need,” Wills says. “Over the years, we have had so much experience with different types of cheese and have developed the capacity to customize even the most common cheeses for individual buyers. If there is a need for a certain melt, flavor profile or aging process, we can make those changes. Sometimes people come who have been getting cheese from a different producer that doesn’t have the capacity and ask if we can match what they do.”

Cedar Grove also works with other cheesemakers to provide space for startups or collaboration on special projects. Wills says this is a means to pay forward the help his own company received from the industry during its earlier years.

“It’s a pretty well-known story that when we were struggling, Swiss Colony bailed us out and provided a new start. Since that, we’ve had the attitude that we need to pay it back,” he says. “We’ve worked with a number of small cheesemakers to give them the opportunity to start making cheese in our plant and develop their own market.”

A number of these collaborators eventually established their own successful businesses, including
Uplands Cheese, Landmark Creamery,

Cesar’s Cheese and Hill Valley, which took over the former Clock Shadow Creamery building in Milwaukee.

Wills also collaborates with other industry veterans, such as Bruce Workman of Edelweiss Creamery.

“Bruce and I were talking about cheese, like Butterkase and Havarti, that we both make,” Wills says. “It was mind blowing. Our cheeses are not that far apart in taste, but we make them entirely differently — it’s like if you went to another planet that had silicon-based life forms instead of carbon. Both of us follow long traditions of cheesemaking, and I was very excited to learn his methods. It’s fun — there is always something new to learn in this industry.”

• New opportunities

Changes and new ventures continue at Cedar Grove as well. Wills closed his Clock Shadow Creamery cheesemaking factory at the end of 2023 in order to simplify operations. In the meantime, he continues to make improvements at the Cedar Grove facility in Plain, Wisconsin.

The company has rebuilt its “Living Machine” water treatment facility, also adding treatment capacity to meet phosphorus regulations. A large wall was created in the process of rebuilding this, and Wills commissioned his son Owen, who is an artist as well as a cheesemonger at Eataly in Los Angeles, to paint a mural on this wall that depicts the cheese factory as it used to look, along with a farmer with milk cans, a cow and a sandhill crane representing the company’s ongoing dedication to the environment.

This coming year, the company also plans to build additions to the factory, expanding its milk receiving bay, adding milk tanks to increase storage capacity and working on other upgrades.

In addition to the new cheese and plant improvements, Wills says a highlight of this past year has been his opportunity to connect with members of the community and industry through presentations. He gave talks about developments in the dairy industry for grade school students in Plain, Wisconsin; a nursing home in Baraboo, Wisconsin; young agricultural leaders at a national conference of Agriculture Future of America in Milwaukee; and employees of the Upper Midwest milk marketing order in the Wisconsin Dells.

“They were variations of the same message — ‘Making Cheese to Make Change,’” Wills says. “I got to talk to a wide range of people in the community.”

He notes Cedar Grove also has been working to empower its milk suppliers who want to explore new ventures such as A2, grass-based, organic or other specialty production; to promote food safety efforts and milk marketing reform; and to create a diverse workforce.

“Our business always has been really built on diversity,” Wills explains. “We’ve made every effort to get every kind of employee — it’s been the sensible thing for us, to take advantage of these opportunities.”

CMN