Culture Magazine

I N N OVAT I O N 202 3 culturecheesemag.com 51 Toma. And more cheese quickly followed: full-flavored Stilton-like Bay Blue, which offers a complement to Original Blue with a fudgier, sweeter profile; an aged gouda in 2014; and an entire suite of flavors was added to the popular Toma, aka the Toma (with Attitude) Family. MOVING UP AND OUT "It was clear that soon we would be us- ing all of the milk our herd was produc- ing," says Hagen. So the sisters decided it was time for a major upgrade. In 2016 they purchased an empty ware- house in Petaluma that had previously housed a beverage distributor. In 2017 they began construction, and a year later they moved in. "It was a huge shift from the farm—we did a big build- out with lots of new equipment and a state-of-the-art filtration room," says Basch, who admits the first year was a bit rocky. One of the biggest challenges was adjusting to not having the entire team in one place (Point Reyes has 120 employees). "Embracing virtual meet- ings was necessary out of the gate, and once production began, we discovered we needed to make some changes to the infrastructure—including creating entirely separate rooms for our Bay Blue and Quinta to keep yeast strains separate and allow for different humid- ity levels." (The yeast used for Quinta requires higher humidity.) Ultimately, the new location became the site for production and packaging of all the cheeses—except for the flagship Origi- nal Blue, which continues to be made at the farm with milk from their own cows and is the only one to retain the farmstead label. At the 21,000-square-foot Petaluma facility, many of the manual postproduction practices have been replaced with more efficient systems. "We are able to achieve much more uniformity," says Hemmerling, who credits the automatic pre-press tables for creating more consistent and firmer wheels. Another welcome upgrade is the new aging room, which has 21-foot- tall ceilings and a carefully controlled air-filtration system. A newly purchased Except for Original Blue, all of Point Reyes' cheese are produced and packaged at the company's Petaluma facility. Master Cheesemaker Kuba Hemmerling. BOTTOM PHOTO: Molly DeCourdreaux

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