Beehive Cheese Partners With Gossner Foods to Make Its Award-Winning Cheddar

Since 2006, Beehive Cheese has been hand-rubbing flavor into its award-winning Barely Buzzed Cheddar. It can be a bit messy, as I discovered when I recently tried it myself.

Fans of Beehive Cheese’s flavor-rubbed cheddars might be surprised that there have been some failures over the years. Such as Maraschino Chocolate Chip cheese.  “We threw it in the dumpster, the pigs didn’t even want that,” said Pat Ford, one of Beehive Cheese’s founders.

  Another failure, he said, used mustard seed. “When we opened it after aging, it smelled like a baby diaper,” said Ford.

 I recently visited Beehive’s Uintah creamery to do a Standard-Examiner story about the company’s new collaboration with Gossner Foods.

After nearly 20 years in business, Beehive has outgrown its Uintah creamery. Beginning last summer, Gossner’s plant in Heyburn, Idaho is making Beehive’s cheese, using Beehive’s codified Promontory Cheddar recipe.

  Then the 40-pound wheels of cheese go to Beehive’s Uintah facility, where they’re rubbed with flavors like porcini mushroom, truffles, Earl Grey tea, or honey and sea salt. Then, they’re aged for three to six months, depending on the type cheese, according to Katie Schall, Beehive’s marketing director.

  I was invited to try rubbing coffee-lavender powder into a 20-pound wheel of cheese to make the company’s top-selling favorite, Barely Buzzed.

  First, you spread organic canola oil all over a 20-pound wheel of Promontory Cheddar, using your gloved hands. Then you rub the coffee/lavender powder over all the surfaces. The cheese is stored to age and let the coffee flavor permeates the cheese.

  When Tim Welsh and Pat Ford got started in 2005, the artisan cheese movement was just gaining traction across the country.  Leaving their day jobs, they took a cheese-making course from Utah State University’s Western Dairy Center. (Other Utah artisan cheesemakers such as Gold Creek Farms in Woodland and Heber Valley Artisan Cheese in Midway got their training from USU too.)

  They made their first batches of their now-classic Promontory Cheddar in 2005.  In 2006, they began playing with flavored rubs on the outside of the cheese. Welsh’s brother roasted coffee, so he had some coffee on hand.

  “We thought, coffee and cream go together, so what about coffee and cheese?” said Ford.

  They called their espresso-and-lavender rubbed cheddar “Barely Buzzed.” They took it to the American Cheese Society’s annual meeting.

  “They thought we were nuts, until they tasted it and liked it,” said Ford.

   Central Market, a Texas gourmet grocery chain, placed the first order for the unusual cheese. The following year, Barely Buzzed took first place in the American Cheese Society’s competition. 

Pat Ford in 2015, with a quarter-wheel of Beehive Cheese. photo by Valerie Phillips

   “That really launched us,” Ford said.

  At the time, flavor-rubbed cheese was uncommon. Now, it’s one of the largest categories in the American Cheese Society’s competition, Ford said.

  All of Beehive’s flavor-rubbed cheeses start with Promontory Cheddar. The key, said Ford, is to enhance the cheese’s natural flavor rather than overpower it.

  Their current roster includes:

  Barely Buzzed – rubbed with espresso and lavender. 

  Queen Bee Porcini – rubbed with porcini mushrooms. 

  Seahive: rubbed with Redmond Real sea salt and raw Slide Ridge honey.

  Pour Me a Slice: infused with basil Hayden Whiskey

  Apple Walnut Smoked: smoked aged cheddar

  Teahive: rubbed with Earl Grey tea

  Big John’s Cajun: rubbed with Cajun spices

  Trufflehive: layered with black truffles.

  Red Butte Hatch Chile – bits of New Mexico Hatch chiles are infused throughout the cheese

  The brand now is sold all across the country, in places like Trader Joe’s, Costco, Whole Foods and Kroger. Locally, it’s carried in Harmons, Smith’s and The Mercantile on Historic 25^th Street in Ogden.

Several years ago, Welsh and Ford turned most of the management over to their grown kids. Britton Welsh is now company president, and Oliver Ford is director of sales.

    Over the years, Beehive Cheese has won more than 150 awards from the American Cheese Society, the World Cheese Awards and, the Utah Cheese Awards. It also holds a B Corp Certification, meaning it meets high standards for social and environmental performance, and passed a rigorous review process.  The foodie activist group, Slow Food USA, has awarded it a Slow Food Snail of Approval award for pursuing and practicing the values of good, clean, fair food.  

Beehive has grown from producing 500 pounds of cheese a year to a million pounds last year, outgrowing its Uintah facility. But the management was wary about investing in a bigger facility, and also wary of bringing in big-money investors, as artisan cheesemakers like Cowgirl Creamery did in California.   “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,” said Britton Welsh. “We’ve seen what can happen when companies sell, take on too much debt, or bring in investors with different goals.”

  Partnering with Gossner Foods, he said, “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 and CEO Kristan Earl called the partnership an “exciting opportunity.”

 Kristan Earl is the great-granddaughter of Edwin Gossner, the master Swiss cheesemaker who founded Gossner Foods in Logan in 1965. Gossner grew up on a family farm in Switzerland, and immigrated to America. He ran creameries in Wisconsin and California before discovering Cache Valley during a family trip to Yellowstone. In 1941, the Cache Valley Dairy Association hired Gossner to convert an old beet sugar plant into a Swiss cheese factory, which he managed for 24 years. He left in 1965 to finally fulfill his dream of operating his own cheese plant. Gossner Foods currently produces 60 million pounds of Swiss cheese each year, according to its company website.

  Today, visitors flock to Gossner’s Alpine-themed headquarters store in Logan to buy products such as cheese “end cuts” and “squeaky” cheese curds, as well as shelf-stable milk. Gossner Foods has a second plant in Heyburn, Idaho (near Burley) where Beehive’s cheese is being made.

  Being known as an “artisan” cheese is one of the reasons that Beehive can command $15-20 per pound at the market. 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.

  Although Beehive is now making a million pounds of cheese a year, it’s still pretty small compared to other cheese manufacturers. For instance, Tillamook County Creamery in Oregon produces more than 188 million pounds of cheese annually, according to its website.

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 cheese makers.”