Not Even Bay Area’s Famed Artisan Creameries Spared From Pandemic’s Economic Toll

It was 13 years ago when Lisa Gottreich decided to turn her twin passions for pet goats and cheese making to profit. So, the Sonoma County resident leased a nearby creamery and got to work.

“The way you make it in agriculture in California is you make a value-added product that you yourself could never afford to buy, and you sell it to venues where you yourself could never afford to dine — and then you’re making it fine,” she says with a laugh.

And that’s exactly what she did.

The hand-crafted cheeses Gottreich sells at Bohemian Creamery in Sebastopol are – to say the least – unique. Among them: goat milk cheese rolled in toasted, ground seaweed harvested from a nearby beach; local cow cheese infused with bee pollen from a local farm; and for dessert lovers, a decadent cow cheese stuffed with cajeta – a sweet, caramelized goat milk.

“I named that one Cowabunga. I invent all my cheeses except for one over there,” said Gottreich, while giving a tour of her operation in early March. She pointed to a rack of newly formed cheeses in the creamery cooler. “That’s an old Sicilian recipe that’s 1,377 years old. And I change nothing.”

Not long after opening her shop in a region known for its artisan creameries, Gottreich was shipping regularly to renowned Northern California chefs, high-end hotels and upscale markets. Even the Obama White House had a standing order for her Boho Belle, a creamy cow’s milk cheese. And with business booming, Gottreich opened a small retail shop for tourists in the creamery’s former milking parlor.

“It’s just a tiny place where I offer anything that I can make out of milk,” she said, pointing to an eclectic array of goats milk derived products, including yogurt, soap, goat whey soda and, of course, her cheeses.

Gottreich’s business has had its share of challenging times, too, with massive wildfires that shut down the regional tourism industry for weeks at a time.

But nothing, she says, compares to the coronavirus pandemic.

In March, Gottreich began to receive a cascade of cancellations of standing orders from businesses she has worked with for years. Almost all of the nearly three dozen orders she had become accustomed to receiving every morning had vanished.

Among them was the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, whose food buyer, in an email wrote, “Well, things are not looking very good at all. We are all struggling, having to deal with major business loss. No cheese needed.”

The pandemic has devastated businesses across the country, with economic ripple effects felt by large webs of suppliers and employees.

Economist and financial author Nomi Prins said when one business gets slammed its suppliers and employees also take the hit, underscoring how tightly we’re all linked financially.

“There are a lot of different ripple effects throughout the chain, up and down,” Prins said. “And every single link in that chain is a human — a person or bunch of people.”

Among Gottreich’s cancellations: a more than decade-long standing order from Valette, a restaurant in the Sonoma County wine country town of Healdsburg. The restaurant’s move last March to only curbside pickups forced chef-owner Dustin Valette to furlough many of his three dozen workers and cut or cancel orders from nearly 30 suppliers — Bohemian Creamery included.

“We help support a lot of farmers and a lot of small independent contractors and a lot of very small producers,” Valette said recently. “So, it was really hard for us to basically reach out to them to say we don’t have a source for your products anymore.”

And as a result, Gottreich, also was forced to cut the hours of her employees and has also cut and canceled orders to her suppliers

That includes 27-year-old Mauricio Gutierrez of Petaluma. A ranch hand by day, Gutierrez had been funding his newly established goat dairy by selling 250 gallons of goat milk each week to Bohemian Creamery.

Mauricio Gutierrez with his goats at the small dairy he runs in Petaluma. (Stephanie O'Neill/KQED)

His 2020 business plan was to grow his herd and his customer base.

“After that,” he said, “I figured I was going to make some sort of profit and I was going to be able to leave my job and be full time with my own dairy.”

But the recent collapse of the dining industry and the subsequent blow to the creamery business forced Gutierrez to dry up his herd. And that means no incoming cash to feed 120 hungry mouths.

“Now, we have to feed the goats out of our own paychecks,” he said of the financial burden that he and his wife now carry. “So we gotta really cut back on whatever we use at home, just buy our necessities, because we have to make sure the goats eat every day.”

And if the economy doesn’t pick up soon, Gutierrez said he’ll be forced to sell off his entire herd and give up his dairy.

There is a glimmer of hope, however. At some restaurants that have recently opened outdoor dining areas, Valette among them, customers are slowly coming back.

And Gottreich says other well-known restaurants have recently resumed purchasing small quantities of her cheeses to sell directly to customers. That, she says, has been a critical boost as she searches for new retail markets to sustain her creamery.

“In some ways, it almost feels like it did when I was first starting out,” Gottreich said. “How do I create this company? How do I build it? How do I make it a viable business?”

Stephanie O’Neill’s reporting is supported through a journalism fellowship at the Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado, Boulder funded by Direct Relief, a nonprofit humanitarian aid organization.

Copyright 2020 KQED