A local cheese packaging company is finally brie-ing itself. WAMC’s Samantha Simmons recently toured Hudson Valley Creamery’s facilities after it won gold at the World Championship Cheese Contest in Wisconsin.
Until last year, Hudson Valley Creamery didn’t have labels that sported their company. But now, the brand that brings recognition to the Hudson Valley can be found in several areas across the country – but not yet locally.
The goat cheese manufacturer is owned by a France-based company, Triballat, which owns two other U.S.-based companies.
Joe Alstat is the company’s quality manager. And a fun fact about him, his least favorite product to taste test is the lemon cheese. Alstat explained how the company, who imports it cheese, processes and packages it.
“It's frozen on a 40-foot container, and then essentially it's in large pallets that weigh about 1500-2000 pounds apiece, and we have to pull them out of the freezer, defrost them, and then it's about three-day defrost time,” Alstat said. “We then take those logs, cut them open, put them into a big 1500-pound mixer, [it] mixes it all up, and then we extrude it using essentially what is a sausage stuffer into the goat cheese logs. And then we have our people take those logs and put it into our packaging.”
Right now, production team members work five days a week on one shift. Alstat says the busiest time of year is around the holidays. On average, they package 10,000 pounds of product a day. Other tasks include filling dry ingredient rooms with product that goes into the cheese like the lemon that Alstat dislikes, as well as garlic, herbs, various fruits, honey, and more.
Alstat says the company is working to get its namesake branded cheese out, but they have a lot of work to do. Alstat says the company packages for other brands for volume reasons – bigger cheese brands want to have every cheese on their cracker.
“We can't necessarily say who we make the cheese for, because it's, you know, we're having non disclosures, but we do produce a lot of cheese for a lot of other brands,” Alstat said.
Like many small businesses, the company says it has been impacted by the Trump administration’s tariffs. The company’s COO Nancy Kipp says they’re not experiencing shipping delays, but increased tariffs will cause a likely 15% increase in transportation costs due to the current oil prices.
But Alstat says the creamery aims to keep quality high and prices low.
“I think a lot of people, they see goat cheese and they think, ‘oh, it's specialty cheese. I can't afford it,’” Alstat said. “But I mean a lot of customers that we sell to are value stores, and the fact that you can walk into a store and buy a four-ounce log of cheese for $1.99 or $2.50, I think that's the real value in it.”
But what does it mean to be a cheese manufacturer when they don’t have their own farm?
Alstat took me on a tour of the facility, where workers were packaging two-pound containers of crumble… the same crumble HVC just won gold for at the World Cheese Championship in Wisconsin. And soon, they’ll have a machine that automatically fills crumble containers that are currently being filled by hand.
Then we take a look at the moulder extruder, which shapes the soft goat cheese into logs.
“Essentially, it's able to take the cheese. There's a vacuum pump. It sucks it down, and then pushes it out through this pipe, and there's a guillotine that cuts it. And we have different dies to make different sizes of cheese, you know, we verify the weight and everything, and then, yeah, it’s just all the different types pushed out,” Alstat said. “But this is essentially the same machine that they use to make, like, hot dogs, it's and sausage and everything.”
Before we take off our protective hairnets, suits, and booties, Alstat told me things don’t always go to plan. In one corner of the production room, an employee was unwrapping already processed cheeses because of a mistake on the line the day before. But Alstat says it’s an easy fix – ratios were off, making the honey cheese’s taste not optimal.
“It had too much honey,” Alstat said. “So, we’re reworking it. So, we have to unwrap them all, unfortunately, and then we're going to reprocess it and get the formula right,” Alstat said.
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, diabetics, if it has too much sugar in it, there's a nutrition label, like, that's a food safety hazard,” Alstat said.
