Cowgirl Creamery: Past, Present and Future
Sue and Peg. Photo credits to Cowgirl Creamery
On January 14th 2021 founders of Cowgirl Creamery, Peggy Smith and Sue Conley, announced their retirement from the specialty cheese business they created over two decades ago. While their cheeses are well-known today, the company’s beginnings were humble. Their first retail location, Pt. Reyes Creamery Barn Shop & Cantina, is housed in a renovated barn in Northern California. It’s where the duo first launched Tomales Bay Foods to showcase products from West Marin before debuting Cowgirl Creamery in 1997.
Smith and Conley built and sustained a solid reputation for their specialty cheeses, all made from organic milk and sourced from surrounding dairies committed to farming practices through regenerative agriculture in Northern California’s Sonoma County area. The business earned many accolades, including an induction into the Guilde des Fromagers, and their cheeses continue to win awards, most recently Mt Tam triple cream made with cow’s milk (sourced from the Straus Family Dairy) won a 2021 Good Food Award. An organic, bloomy-rind cheese, it has aromas of mushrooms, fresh radishes, and hay. Red Hawk is also a top seller, an organic, washed rind, triple cream made with cow’s milk. Altogether they produce about eight artisanal cheeses plus fresh cottage cheese, fromage blanc and creme fraiche. In 2016 the company was sold to Emmi Group, a Swiss cheese company that also bought California based artisan cheeses companies, Cypress Grove Chèvre and Redwood Hill. These acquisitions have widely been seen as a positive development, allowing the companies to thrive and giving them added resources.
Smith and Conley are also lauded for their cookbook, published in 2013, Cowgirl Creamery Cooks. Along with the backstory of the Cowgirls, and the rise of the organic food movement, the book contains a rich collection of recipes, including its ever-popular grilled cheese sandwich, which is currently being served at the Ferry Building Shop & Sidekick Café. While the sandwich’s ingredients may vary from time to time, Smith and Conley say its success is all about the right combination of cheese, the right butter (regular not clarified), and a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet, or any large pan that has a heavy bottom. The duo likes to use a wagon wheel—a raclette-style cheese—while adding just a hint of fromage blanc. No ordinary sandwich, it is served on crispy, golden browned sourdough-based bread from Red Bird Bakery and oozes with flavors of brown butter, heavy cream, roasted leeks, and roasted garlic. “It’s a mean grilled cheese sandwich,” says Amanda Parker, who is now at the helm of the business. Parker has a background in both business training and cheese expertise, having earned an MBA and over eight years of experience working with Murray’s Cheese, where she first started as cheesemonger until becoming VP of business development. She joined Cowgirl Creamery in 2018 and has been working on the transition with Smith and Conley ever since.
“We’ve been working towards this for a long time, so it’s exciting for them to be able to relax in a little bit in theory, but I’m sure they have a lot of projects up their sleeves,” said Parker during a phone interview.
Amanda Parker photo credit Isabel Baer
The company’s two retail locations—in Northern California, and in San Francisco’s Ferry Building—have no doubt endured several challenges over the past year amid the pandemic. “It’s been a tumultuous year,” says Parker, “and we have certainly had to keep an eye on not only regulations related to COVID-19, shelter-in-place, lockdown, and whatnot, but then we’ve obviously had our fire and season over the late summer and fall.” In fact, it was a year of record-breaking wildfires, with 2020 deemed the worst wildfire season in state history. While the cantina was safe from the fires, the store was closed for a few days this summer due to the fire and smoke. “It’s been hard,” adds Parker, “but we are resilient.”
Today, the Cantina is open but with limited capacity due to government-mandated regulations with COVID-19, while the Ferry Building location in San Francisco is “technically open,” said Parker, but with reduced hours since foot traffic in the building is slow. As for the company’s sales, some areas have plummeted while others have seen growth. As reported by Food & Wine, “some artisan cheesemakers have seen revenues decline by 80 percent” mainly through hard hits in the hospitality industry. Cowgirl Creamery’s sharpest decline in business is due to partial or permanent closures of restaurants and wineries, as well as the cancellation of events.
Despite the recent challenges, Parker said that Cowgirl Creamery has seen growth in national distribution with sales in grocery stores, such as Whole Foods and other food specialty shops since more and more people are shopping for cheese to eat at home during the pandemic. Additionally, the company’s largest percentage of growth is in its e-commerce arm. On its website, customers can order gift boxes and cheese clubs and collections, an area in which the company had a record month in December with online sales. “We have seen a huge growth spike early on from people stuck at home and ordering cheese for themselves or buying gift boxes for people or packages from corporate sales,” said Parker. “[Today] everyone is sending cheese as a gift.”
Looking ahead into the future, Parker said she has no seismic plans for change to the company. “The great thing about Cowgirl Creamery is that Peggy and Sue have set such a great foundation, so we’re not going to fundamentally change any of that,” she said, adding that she and her team are looking carefully at the areas that are important to them, such as their commitment to organics, their dairy suppliers, and their commitment to the community and to their employees. “Those are foundational values that no one, myself, first of all, wants to change, but of course we have to look at our business and how we can continue we can continue to evolve and grow, and frankly rebuild after a tough last year,” she said.