Since 2020, the Dairy Business Innovation Alliance has released five different rounds of grant money to dairy businesses across several states, including Wisconsin. The money totals more than $6 million dollars. One of the dairy businesses here in Wisconsin to get awarded a few of these grants is Alpinage Artisan Cheese in Oak Creek, just 10 minutes south of Milwaukee.
Founder Orphee Paillotin has a unique story of how he came to be a Wisconsin cheesemaker and how the Dairy Business grants from DBIA have been instrumental in moving the cheesemaking forward.
“I’m from France. I’m a French national, and I moved to America in 2015. I actually came here working for a French company in information systems, so a completely different world,” Paillotin tells Mid-West Farm Report.
He credits the Heimerl family — Paula and her father Jerry — for grooming him into a cheesemaker.
Paillotin successfully attained his Wisconsin Cheesemaker License through the Center for Dairy Research at UW-Madison in 2019. Then he studied the art and science of affinage– aging — in France under Laurent Mons at the world famous Academy Mons. Meanwhile, Paula, having grown up as part of the sixth generation on her family’s dairy farm in Manitowoc County, watched her parents build a cheesemaking company from the ground up using the milk from their farm. She adds unique experience and knowledge to the Alpinage partnership.
In 2019, they found the perfect space in Oak Creek to construct a fully licensed dairy plant. This cave-like aging facility is where affinage happens.
“It took us almost 2 and a half years to actually get our first cheese out of our production facility,” Paillotin says. “So it was a very long process.”
Alpinage Artisan Cheese makes one type of cheese (so far) named Raclette. It’s a popular Alpine-style cheese in Europe that comes from the French word that means “to scrape.”
“It’s something that we eat a lot especially in the winter back in France. When I moved here, I had a hard time to find it in stores,” Paillotin explains. “When we decided to make cheese — you’ve got to find your niche market. I was not going to make gouda or cheddar. A lot of people do it and they do it very well already, so I’m not going to compete with that. I really wanted to find a product that first talked to me, a product that I really want to make, that I really want to eat, and in this case, it was Raclette cheese.”
He says he’s grateful for the help he got from the industry for the company’s success thus far, specifically the DBIA grants.
“It really, really saved us,” he says. “I was lucky enough to have some savings, so I poured some money into the company, but I did not realize it was going to be that costly. Starting a cheese company… if you’re not from the dairy business, it’s really hard.”
He got grants in 2021 and 2022 for a total of $90,000 that he used for cheesemaking equipment.
“Every single piece of equipment that you want to buy is extremely expensive,” he says. “It’s not a nice to have, it’s really essential equipment… and it was just stacking up. The DBIA grant really came at the right time.”
He got a grant in December 2022 for $100,000 to buy bigger equipment to improve processes at the cheese cave and to scale up production.
“We are working hard. We are working on a new product as well… we’re trying to expand our product line,” he says. “And I’m really amazed by the overwhelming amount of help we got from the dairy industry.”
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