Alemar Cheese, longtime Minnesota producer of soft French-style cheeses, moves to California

Alemar Cheese, an award-winning creamery that’s been located at the Food Building in Northeast Minneapolis since 2019, has packed up and moved west.

Founder Keith Adams is relocating the company to Sebastopol, Calif., a town about 50 miles north of San Francisco where he runs another creamery that makes aged British-style cheeses.

Adams started Alemar, which makes soft cheeses inspired by French classics like camembert and brie, in Mankato in 2008. He moved back to California, his home state, about a decade ago but kept the company in Minnesota. The company’s move to the Food Building in 2019 and hiring of head cheesemaker Charlotte Serino in 2021 raised Alemar’s profile in the Minnesota artisan cheese scene, and their cheeses have taken home several national American Cheese Society prizes in recent years.

But the company hasn’t turned a profit since the pandemic began, Adams said. Serino left earlier this year when her fiance took a job elsewhere, and Adams struggled to find another cheesemaker at her level.

And at about the same time, the small family farm that has supplied milk to Alemar for the past six or so years entered into a contract with a dairy co-op, which provided a more stable market for the farm but meant they could no longer sell milk to Alemar. Nearly every other organic dairy farm in the state with grass-fed cows, a priority for Adams, also has exclusivity contracts with co-ops, Adams said, so finding a new milk supplier was tough. In recent months, Alemar has been pinch-hitting by buying milk from Redhead Creamery, another respected cheese producer in Brooten, Minn.

With no money, no cheesemaker and no long-term milk source, Adams said, he realized the only way forward was to consolidate operations in California.

“In the end, it came down to two choices: Close down, which I very much did not want to do because I believe we’re at the top of the game in terms of making soft-ripened cheese, or move,” Adams said. “I really didn’t want to move, but it became apparent that it was that or nothing.”

If the decision feels sudden or abrupt, it was: Adams only made the call to move the company about two weeks ago, he said. He loaded the company’s cheese equipment into a U-Haul truck and started driving Tuesday, and he plans to restart production in California as early as next week.

Through his other company, William Cofield Cheesemakers, Adams already has a stable source of organic and grass-fed milk. And the new Alemar head cheesemaker? Keith Adams.

“I have to admit, there’s definitely some excitement for me being back in the vat making (Alemar) cheeses like Bent River, which I haven’t done for 10 years,” he said.

Alemar was the second cheese company at the Food Building; Lone Grazer Creamery operated there from the building’s opening in 2015 to 2017. As for the future of the cheese production space there, Food Building founder Kieran Folliard could not immediately be reached for comment.

Several other marquee spaces at the Food Building have changed hands in recent years: Lowry Hill Provisions, a salami company, replaced Red Table Meats early last year, and Diane’s Place, a restaurant from renowned pastry chef Diane Moua, opened to fanfare earlier this year in the space that used to be a marketplace cafe called Kieran’s Kitchen.

The building is also home to Baker’s Field Flour & Bread, nonalcoholic beverage company 3LECHE and Folliard’s Red Locks Irish Whiskey.