Down a Georgia Road with Cheese

By Lorrie Baumann

CalyRoad Creamery’s retail shop in Sandy Springs, Georgia, is a key component in the business model that provides multiple revenue streams to keep Founder and Owner Robin Schick afloat while she exercises her passion for making artisanal cheeses. Her small creamery and its shop are located in a retail building in a commercial district at the heart of Sandy Springs, a suburb on the north side of Atlanta, Georgia.

Her business plan has three main components for producing revenue from her artisanal cheese production: the retail operation, which includes marketing events and classes as well as her shop sales; wholesale distribution to local foodservice establishments; and distribution to other regional retailers. She’s still working on the economics of a relationship with a wholesale foods distributor into retail that will be a key to real profitability, but she’s able to support her business with the revenues generated through the other streams. “We’re knocking on the door,” Schick said. “I think what we found is that it has to be a combination of revenue streams. We needed to develop the retail aspect — events with corporate team building in which companies bring in their staff and do a wine and cheese tasting or a class together. We do birthday parties here.”

CalyRoad Creamery really started a decade ago with a phone conversation between Schick and her sister Cathy Lynne, who was living on a 13-acre farm with some pet goats. “My sister and I were trying to decide if we wanted to work together and what we wanted to do, Schick says. “We were laughing and joking about milking the goats, and we got serious.” The two of them went to the University of Georgia’s Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development and asked them to do a feasibility study. With the university’s encouragement, Schick and her sister developed a business plan and then did some internships at local farms before heading off to the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese to learn how to make cheese. When they were ready, they found a goat dairy where they could launch their cheesemaking business with a 35-gallon cheese vat and a recipe for chevre while the farmer took care of the animal husbandry. “We quickly realized that there was no way we could learn both sides of this and do it well, so we concentrated on the cheesemaking,” Schick said.

As time went on, the farmer decided to retire from farming, the goat herd was adopted by another dairy, and Schick needed to find a new home for her cheesemaking operation. She decided to leave the farmstead concept behind in favor of a location closer to Atlanta’s urban market. CalyRoad Creamery found its new home in a small building about 60 or 70 years old on a side street in Sandy Springs, about 15 minutes north of downtown Atlanta. With 900 square feet of production space, 100 square feet of retail shop space and herself as the cheesemaker, Schick was back in business. “We had a very nice following in nine farmers markets and a nice following with wholesale into some of the white tablecloth restaurants in Atlanta,” she said. “We quickly realized that with a 35-gallon vat, we were never going to produce enough to make a living.”

That realization would be enough to knock the wind out of most women, and Schick was no exception. Then she had what she calls a “Little Epiphany,” which is now the name of one of her cheeses, a high-moisture, soft-ripened cow milk cheese with delicate floral notes that she’d just figured out how to make when she was at her most discouraged about the future of her business.

She’d just moved into the new production facility, and she was making cheese she loved, but with her tiny vat, she just wasn’t making money, she told her mom. Her mom asked her if she was actually losing money. Schick said no, she was covering her bills — she just wasn’t making a profit. “Then what’s the problem?” her mother asked. “Why are you measuring by money rather than by your experience that making your cheese makes you happy?”
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“It was Christmas time, and I thought they were so right,” Schick said. “It was my epiphany that it didn’t matter. … That cheese is near and dear to my heart.”

When the two retail suites next to her small shop became available, she had to decide whether to expand or quit, and she decided to expand. She sold her 35-gallon vat and bought a 350-gallon cheese vat and a 700-gallon bulk tank for milk. She built a couple of new aging rooms into the additional space so she can make more cheese varieties. With a total of three aging rooms now, one is dedicated to hard cheese, one to blue cheeses and the third to white mold cheeses.

While in the 35-gallon vat days she was making chevre, a Camembert-style cheese called WayPoint, a feta, and a blue cow milk cheese called Bit O’ Blue, now she’s doing cheddar cheese curds and a tomme-style cheese called Hilderbrand that’s aged a minimum of six weeks, with some of her Hilderbrand inventory now at eight or nine months as she builds her stock for a big order from Delta Airlines.

She has WayPoint and several aged goat cheeses flavored with various spices in her white mold room along with Big Bloomy, a plain aged goat cheese and Black Rock, a pepper bloomy rind that was a 2018 finalist in the Flavor of Georgia Food Product Contest, which, according to the Georgia Department of Agriculture, is “the state’s premier proving ground for small, upstart food companies as well as time-tested products.”

Her cheeses also include Red Top, a flavored goat cheese rubbed with smoked Spanish paprika that’s named after Red Top Mountain, where iron ore was once mined and which is now a state park. Named, like most of Schick’s goat cheeses, for another famous Georgia landmark, Little Stone Mountain is an ash-rind goat cheese that’s a customer favorite.

David Rospond has joined CalyRoad’s creamery as Cheesemaker, Cheese Oracle Tim Gaddis is teaching a couple of classes a month on cheese pairing and cheese board selection in CalyRoad’s shop and Schick is busy dreaming of new cheeses that Rospond will help her make. “I taught him all that I knew, and now we’re both working together to learn more and more,” she said of Rospond. “He has just been a joy to work with. He fell right into it. … He knew how to read the recipes, and he knew intuitively what to do, which is great.”