Discovering Vermont's Dairy Haute Couture

By Mary Elizabeth Fratini

Allison Hooper is a lot like her cheese - mellow, unassuming, and yet remarkable and unforgettable - even if it is a characterization with which she isn't yet totally comfortable. Hooper, with partner Bob Reese, founded the Websterville-based Vermont Butter and Cheese Company in 1984 with three products most Americans had never even heard of - crème fraiche, fromage blanc, and chèvre. Since then, she has introduced the country to French varieties of cows' and goats' milk cheeses, if not single-handedly, then as one of less than a half dozen women around the country similarly inspired by a love of artisan cheeses.

In Hooper's case, the love affair began as an accident of housing: she was between semesters during her junior year abroad in Paris and needed room and board to remain through the summer. "I thought oh, how am I going to do this? I had no money for a Europass, nothing," Hooper recalls. With the help of France's version of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, she wrote an estimated three dozen letters to farmers around France offering her labor in exchange for room and board, despite having no experience in agriculture. Responses came slowly from several vegetable farmers in the south, but then one reply came from a small dairy farm in Brittany, and Hooper dove into what would ultimately become a nearly $8-million-a-year company three decades later.

Hooper spent that summer as an all-around farm hand - milking, tending livestock, haying, gardening and, of course, making and eating a variety of traditional French cheeses. But the experience did not translate into an immediate career shift for the French major, who finished her senior year at Connecticut College and then traveled to Taiwan for eight months to study Mandarin. However, while she was in Taipei, Hooper realized that turning her facility with these three languages into a living would require staying there, at least based on the experiences of fellow ex-pats, an unappealing prospect for her. So it was back to France. She completed another short stint at the Brittany farm and then spent two months at a different mountain farm. The latter she describes as the quintessential agrarian romance - complete with fields of wild lavender for free-ranging goats that were herded through the town at the end of the day, and bi-weekly trips in a rickety truck down into the valley to deliver farm products (yes, more cheese) to markets and restaurants.

Hooper flew standby from London home to New Jersey "with maybe a dollar in my pocket," and began working for a woman with a large herd of goats who sold homemade cheese and goat's milk at the Greenmarkets in New York City. "Her cheese was not very interesting," Hooper recalls, and she suggested making it more like the French cheeses of which she had grown so fond. The result was an upsurge in sales and a realization for Hooper that she needed to be doing this work for herself, rather than someone else.

New Ventures

Making her way to Vermont in 1983, Hooper landed a job in the dairy lab at the Vermont Department of Agriculture and crossed paths a year later with Reese, then a marketing director at the agency. Reese was planning a dinner prepared by Vermont's top chefs featuring local products - a novelty enterprise at the time, when Vermont was far from anyone's radar as a foodie destination. One chef, from the Topnotch Resort in Stowe, needed goat cheese for his entrée and couldn't find a local source. Reese turned to Hooper, who turned to her stovetop for a single batch of chèvre. "It is not something I would recommend, but it worked," she says. "It wasn't particularly great, but I think it was intriguing to the other chefs at the dinner, so they wanted to buy it and we said, 'Oh, let's start a business.'"

Reese and Hooper both left the Department of Agriculture in 1984 to found Vermont Butter and Cheese Company with $1,200 equity each and a $4,000 loan from a revolving agricultural fund at the United Church of Christ in Randolph. They used that capital to retrofit a small milkhouse in Brookfield with a cheese vat and secured an additional $10,000 from the Randolph National Bank to install a boiler to pasteurize the milk.

It was a markedly easier decision for her to leave her job than for him, Hooper notes. She was a single 24-year-old woman with no dependents of the human or animal variety, no mortgage, and not even a car payment - just an old Volvo station wagon. Reese, on the other hand, was 27 years old, married, with a new baby and a new house (and mortgage) in Williston. "He had to reckon with the in-laws," Hooper recalled with a laugh. "You know, 'Bob, this cheese thing has been fun, but I need you to get serious about getting a real job.'"

Though much lauded today, Vermont Butter and Cheese was no overnight success. Producing just three products, Reese and Hooper worked for four years without salary. Hooper hired herself out as a milker and borrowed money from her parents who had retired in Vermont. "It was amazing how you could live with no money, because when you start a business you are working all the time," she recalls. "But I pieced things together, lived on absolutely nothing."

Hooper made the cheese and Bob installed a cooler in his Subaru station wagon to deliver the products to local stores, restaurants, and farmers' markets. Despite the ubiquity of crumbled goat cheese on harvest salads today, Hooper notes that everyone thought they were crazy - including their suppliers, like Booth Brothers Dairy. "It was brutal because today you see all kinds of goat cheeses, but not at that time. There was very little in terms of a cheese case - maybe a little bit of cheddar in the refrigerated section, but that was it. And people didn't buy cheese at farmers' markets then."

After finding a distributor to carry their products in Boston, Hooper and Reese made the decision to target French chefs in New York City. "We thought, the chefs will know, they will understand this product and be able to judge whether they'll use a domestic [supplier] or not," Hooper says. A trip to the annual New York Fancy Foods Show in 1988 netted the four-year-old company an additional six distributors and cemented the company's direction for the next two decades. Today, Vermont Butter and Cheese remains a food service supplier first, and retailer second.

The timing was perfect, says Hooper: the dollar was weaking, importers were balking at increased regulation and pricing of imported products, and the early 1980s had already seen outbreaks of lysteria. "We were this little domestic cheese darling," Hooper recalls.

Growing Pains

Around that time, the company moved to a larger space at an industrial park in Websterville, just around the corner from the granite quarries in Barre, where they remain today. The same small product line was now offered in both retail and commercial quantities. When Hooper became pregnant with her first child in 1991, they bought a chèvre log-making machine to replace her while she was on maternity leave. "But it wasn't working right, so I finally called this guy in Chicago and said, 'You've got to get out here and fix this machine for me,'" Hooper recalls. By the time he came, Hooper was only hours from giving birth and still working the floor. "You know how women say they have one last thing they have to do before they have their baby? Well, I had to get my machine fixed."

Hooper's first son was followed by twins two and a half years later, and she and her husband Don, who works for the National Wildlife Federation in Montpelier, had to hire a series of au pairs. Hooper says she missed out on a lot of time with the kids. "When Miles was a baby I had a wonderful woman who took care of him and I never saw that kid. I would drop him off early in the morning and pick him up at night when he was already asleep - fed and in his sleeper. We spent a lot of years doing that."

Although Hooper describes her company as generally family friendly - "you work and you deserve some space when you have your kids, that's my philosophy," she says - she also noted the difficulty of working in a dairy plant with young children. "The hours are not flexible because things have to happen to the milk at certain times of the day and there isn't anything we can do about that, so we don't have too many women with young kids on the floor," she says.

New Kids on the Cheese Block

Over the years, Hooper expanded the product line, largely at the request of chefs, adding chèvre in different varieties, then a mascarpone cheese, a spreadable and later crumbled chèvre, a feta, and finally, butter.

Despite the name, the company only made butter for a short time early on, in hand churned batches. On the hunt for a churn, Hooper found one literally on the side of the road outside of the McNamara Dairy in Plainfield, New Hampshire. Now lovingly ensconced in its own room at the Websterville plant, the machine makes a true European-style, high-fat churned butter in 800-gallon batches.

In addition to the one-pound rolls found in the supermarket, Vermont Butter and Cheese also makes a butter with sea salt crystals packaged in a basket, which won Outstanding Cheese or Dairy Product at the New York Fancy Food Festival in 2005.

The high butterfat is a signature of all Vermont Butter and Cheese products, with the exception of the fromage blanc, whose popularity comes from its high protein, fat-free nature. But the crème fraiche weighs in at a hearty 42 percent, the mascarpone at 50 percent, and the butter a whopping 86 percent.

"We've been lucky at plugging ourselves into certain food trends: we started selling butter at a time when it was making a big comeback. For years nobody ate fat and then all of sudden people decided that it was really okay to eat butter," Hooper says. "People try the butter and get quite addicted to it and say, I just can't go back."

The latest additions to the Vermont Butter and Cheese repertoire are three aged goat cheeses - Bonne Bouche, Coupole, and Bijou. With help from a Vermont Community Development grant, the company added a new section to the plant specifically for their production, because they use a bacteria known as geotrichum, which is common to French cheeses but also finicky and difficult to control.

The addition has separate rooms for culturing, ladling, drying and aging the cheeses at precise temperatures and humidities for each stage to preserve the desired culture without exposing the cheese to more aggressive blue and black molds. Fine-tuning the three products took Hooper the better part of a year, the assistance of a visiting French cheese expert, and many dumpsters of failed attempts. But the results are palpable in both flavor and accolades - the Bonne Bouche won Outstanding New Product at this year's Fancy Food Show, less than one year out on the market.

Building an Industry

"We took advantage of every small business financing opportunity that we could find," Hooper says of their early days. "The SBA [Small Business Administration] is by far the most important tool because of their guaranteed loan program. Commercial banks wouldn't even look at us."

"Also, in terms of operations, there wasn't anyone to help us on the cheese side; I was really on my own and ended up looking to France," Hooper says. The recent formation of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese (VIAC) at the University of Vermont is meant to bridge that gap by bringing European cheesemakers to Vermont for intensive practical courses, but Hooper noted that many of the students come to VIAC from other states to access that service.

"We are just starting to get the attention of the agriculture department in terms of developing the milk supply, and I think that is the kind of thing where farmers are very conservative and are not going to jump on something just because one company is buying goats' milk," Hooper noted. Currently, Vermont Butter and Cheese buys all of their cows' milk through the St. Albans Cooperative and purchase goats' milk from 17-22 farms, many of them local, although they do still purchase from an Amish cooperative in upstate New York and a cooperative in Michigan to meet their demand.

Of the efforts of the state on behalf of farmers and producers of value-added agricultural projects, Hooper would like to see a shift in emphasis from marketing to building local infrastructure. "I think that individual companies really need to try to build marketing in - that is their business and we shouldn't expect Vermont taxpayers, especially with the tiny general budget that we have here in Vermont, to market our products for us," she says. "But I do think it is appropriate for the state Agency of Agriculture to have a role in creating infrastructure for the raw material supply, whether it is goats' milk or apples for the Mystic Pie Company or soy for Vermont Soy - those are the kinds of projects where private enterprise needs help."

After almost a quarter century of production, Hooper's role in the company has shifted into a new realm: sharing her story. It is a fitful transition for a woman who describes herself - and her partner - as self-effacing to a fault, but one to which Hooper is, perhaps, better suited than she realizes.

The artisan cheese industry has exploded in Vermont and nationwide over the last 25 years and Hooper has been present for each of the major milestones, usually as the driving force. Following their receipt of the SBA Vermont Business of the Year award in 1996, Reese and Hooper spearheaded the creation of the Vermont Cheese Council (VCC) with 12 charter members.

The VCC, of which Hooper served as president the first five years, has grown from a founding 12 members to 45. Many moved here from out of state, attracted by the strength of Vermont's artisan cheese industry. Hooper predicted that Vermont would be "the Napa valley of cheese" that it has, indeed, become. "It felt really audacious to say something like that, but now I hear it all the time."

VCC is considered a model of a regional guild for the American Cheese Society (ACS), of which Hooper is now in her second year as president. VCC ranks with the California Cheese Advisory Board and Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board in terms of industry influence and expertise - this despite a $28,000 annual budget compared with Wisconsin's $30 million. The council's only outreach to the public is through a quarterly newsletter and Web site, but one of Hooper's early ideas caught on strong and has taken on a life of its own: The Vermont Cheese Trail. "I love looking at these maps of France - the Route du Fromage in the Pyrennees - and thought, we can do that." With the help of Tim Newcomb in Montpelier, the VCC came up with its own highly popular map.

Whereas the VCC is a coalition of cheesemakers, the 24-year-old ACS also encompasses distributors, retailers and some media, making it a slightly more unwieldy group to lead. ACS is the umbrella trade organization for 1,400 members, about one-third of which are cheesemakers. Its chief aim is to disseminate information about a specialized artisan industry in a fast-growing market. The focus for ACS continues to be the annual conference, this year in Burlington, Vermont from August 1-5.

Looking Back, Moving Forward

Hooper faced several hurdles from early on. "I think it was difficult for me, in this industry, to gain credibility as a young woman," she says. "Particularly making a very unconventional product, it was hard to get people to take me seriously in the dairy industry, which is a man's industry. That is changing, certainly in terms of artisan cheese and specialty foods, but it wasn't always that way.

"Certainly in Vermont, in terms of the goat milk industry, it has taken many years to gain some respect there - real Vermonters do not milk goats - and the farmers in our valley were so skeptical, they just didn't know what to say to me because they were so certain we would go out of business."

Despite her monumental and continuing successes as a business owner - Vermont Butter and Cheese's sales grew more than 10 percent last year and are on pace to do that again this year - Hooper remains non-plussed by her own starring role in developing a now-trendy industry.

"When you are in the business every day, you don't realize what you have learned and the authority you have become in the industry," Hooper says, recalling an event from the most recent Fancy Food Festival when a woman said to her, "I can't believe I'm here and standing next to you and you are talking to me!" "I thought, how odd, because for us it is our jobs and we are just doing them and just happen to be doing them for a long time, but now it is this really groovy, trendy, cool thing."

While Hooper says she doesn't necessarily prefer one role over the other, cheesemaker over public face of a popular cheese company, she admits that the transition raises some questions. "It makes it difficult to figure out how to define yourself if you are not the person crunching numbers or making cheese or doing sales. I think you have to have a huge ego to say, 'I'm the visionary' - and that's just not who I am. I like to imagine new things that seem so undoable to us right now, things that seem impossible - like, can you imagine if Americans really did eat fromage blanc every day? Imagine that. But when we started in 1984 we didn't believe people would eat goat cheese in the numbers they do today; it wasn't even on our minds. I just wanted to make cheese."

Those cheeses have racked up more than 100 awards at regional, national and international competitions, and made it clear that pasteurized artisan cheeses can hold their own against the traditional raw milk varieties - when made by the right hands. Alas, Allison Hooper has only two.

Mary Fratini is assistant editor of Vermont Woman and full-time cheese lover living in Barre - and also a recent convert to the almost-daily fromage blanc.