French la Vie

"To hear Baird Rumiano tell it, the story of the Rumiano Cheese Company — which its executives say is the oldest family-owned cheese maker in California — is not simply about cheese.

It’s also a family tale, a story about a making your way in America. It’s a story shaped by war and, more recently, by whey (protein).

Recently, I wrote about how Musso & Frank, an iconic Hollywood restaurant, has managed to stay in business for a century in a rapidly transforming California. I wondered the same about Rumiano, which celebrated its 100th birthday late last month.

Today, the company has almost 200 employees at a manufacturing facility in Crescent City, a coastal town not far from the Oregon border, and at a distribution center in Willows, near Chico.

While the company sells many of its organic cheeses at specialty markets, you are perhaps most likely to have tasted Rumiano’s Cheddar in Annie's Organic Mac and Cheese.

Mr. Rumiano’s great-grandfather started the business not long after coming to California from Italy in the early 1900s.

It started out as a small operation, mostly distributing imports and making a dry Monterey Jack cheese for immigrants like themselves, who longed for Parmesan, which was scarce.

Then, during World War II, the Rumiano family got a government contract to make rations, and business boomed.

“They were supplying the armed forces with what we call American-style cheese,” Mr. Rumiano said, made by taking a natural cheese and remelting it with salt and other preservatives to make it shelf-stable.

After the war, demand decreased, and the factories that Rumiano had opened were whittled back down to two.

By the time Mr. Rumiano, along with his brother John, took over the business from the rest of their family in 1979, the business’s future was tenuous. Neither had much experience.

“We had the slide rule, and we just got to work calculating cash flows and all this other stuff,” he said, “and we decided that you know, I think we can do it.”

The company refocused on churning out fresh, natural cheeses, Mr. Rumiano said.

And its placement in Northern California’s dairy country — where cows can graze in emerald pastures for 300 days out of the year — gave it an advantage.

“My grandfather always said Crescent City had the finest milk of any place in the world,” Mr. Rumiano said.

That’s a big reason the company that had brought processed cheese to California was also among the first to hop aboard the organic foods train. About 70 percent of the company’s milk comes from organic dairy farms, it says, many of which have also been in business for generations.

Nevertheless, Nate Donnay, a dairy industry analyst with INTL FCStone Financial, said it was impressive for a midsize producer like Rumiano to have held out for as long as it has.

“There has been a tremendous change in the structure of supply and demand over the past 15 years,” he said, “much less the past 100.”

Cheese companies, he said, must contend with shifts in government policies, weather patterns, and consumer tastes. Over the past decade, higher costs of water and land have driven family dairy farms away from California.

Gigantic plants in the Midwest churn out more than 400 million pounds of cheese per year — the vast majority of the cheese that’s made in the U.S.

But Joe Baird, Rumiano’s chief executive, said the company was working to stay ahead.

In recent years, Rumiano has invested about $20 million in equipment at its factories to separate out whey protein concentrate and lactose.

That serves the dual purpose of decreasing waste and of creating a byproduct that is itself in rising demand.

The company now ships whey protein, for fitness shakes or baby formula, around the world, including to fast-growing Asian markets, where American organic certification is a “gold standard.”

Mr. Baird said that in spite of the growth in Asia and in Mexico, the company is still intent on deepening its presence in its home state.

“The brothers have this long view,” Mr. Baird said."

Article from the New York Times