Wisconsin has an official bird, an official state soil, and many other items designated as state symbols. But no specific cheese has been given the designation.
A group from Colby, where Colby cheese was first manufactured, has been working to change that and make their hometown product the official state cheese. The Assembly Agriculture Committee held a hearing in February on a proposal to make Colby cheese the official state cheese, but the Colby group’s efforts have so far stalled there.
Matt Oemichen, one of the leaders of the Colby group’s efforts, said he believed the effort was going well until the days after the hearing. But he said apparent concerns about favoring one cheese manufactured in the state over any others might have been causes for the legislation stalling.
Oemichen said there’s no intent to favor one cheese over another, or to have one cheese-making community favored over another. However, he said, Colby cheese should have the designation because Colby cheese was the first Wisconsin-original cheese.
Joseph Steinwand first produced Colby cheese in 1885 at his plant near the city of Colby, which is in central Wisconsin along the Clark and Marathon county line. Oemichen said the cheese was produced without stipulations about who can use the process — in a sense making it a cheese for the entire state.
“When you dig down deeper of how the cheese was made, it was made by an individual who dreamed big of creating a new cheese to kind of springboard our industry into what it was and what it is still today,” Oemichen said. “It has the hallmarks of everything that makes it a genuine Wisconsin item. It comes from a small hometown, a rural community and it represents all that is best with dairy farming, the rural communities they support and the individuals that dare to dream big beyond their cities’ borders.”
Many of the state’s symbols — including the state beverage (milk) and state bird (robin) are shared by other states, he said.
Oemichen said Colby cheese is unique to Wisconsin.
“Nobody has an American original like we have,” he said.
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