Curds and Whey Hope woman turns around cheese-making business

Any mention of curds and whey works like a pass code among generations born of simpler times: days when milk kept cool in a spring house, and enterprising families simmered the surplus into cheese.

Catherine Morrill, after seven years of hard work, appears on the verge of cracking that code. A recently settled legal battle made the 46-year-old Hope resident sole owner of the Rockport-based State of Maine Cheese Co., which she has operated since 1996. A successful new location is boosting retail sales, helping shore up the slow midwinter season for both the cheese maker and the dairy farms that supply milk to the company.

On Wednesday, as cheese makers raked and shoveled curd that had been simmered out of 10,000 pounds of milk, Morrill said her company is all too ready to settle into a simpler, more profitable existence.

“It’s been a little bit of a bigger challenge than we thought it would be, but these things are, especially when you are a novice walking into it,” said Morrill, a former senior vice president with KeyBank who sports a wide smile even when she talks about tough times. “I didn’t know anything about making cheese, except for maybe cottage cheese on my stove.”

The challenge began with winning back lost wholesale customers and rebuilding neglected equipment. It included a three-year legal battle to wrest control of the company from the partner with whom Morrill shared the deal in 1996 and who defaulted on a subsequent $100,000 loan from Morrill. A Knox County Superior Court judge handed Morrill full ownership of the business in May.

While the court case moved ahead, Morrill formed a partnership with her husband, Frank, to build a new 17,000-square-foot building to house Ragged Mountain Welding & Fabrication, his marine specialty welding shop, her cheese business and a half-dozen rent-paying tenants, including the midcoast bureau of the Bangor Daily News.

State of Maine Cheese moved in November 2000. Morrill invited an array of agriculture and art-based Maine businesses to display their goods in the new 4,500-square-foot retail showroom. She also established the space as the November through May home of the Camden farmers market, helping State of Maine Cheese and local growers through the slowest portions of the year.

The shop has fast become a personable stopover for tourists and residents, promoting made-in-Maine goods and connecting taste buds to State of Maine cheese without doling a cut to a middleman. The effect on business was almost immediate.

“When we bought the company in 1996, because we were in a much smaller space, it was 80 percent wholesale and 20 percent retail,” Morrill said. “Now it is 60 percent retail and 40 percent wholesale.”

Another piece of Morrill’s growth strategy is the company’s expanding list of direct-mail customers. Regular recipients include the Bushes of Walker Point in Kennebunkport, Dan Rather, Cokie Roberts and Homeland Security Secretary Tommy Thompson.

Most of State of Maine’s wholesale business comes from Hannaford Bros. and Shaw’s Supermarkets, plus a scattering of small natural food and gourmet grocers across the state. Total sales for 2002 were $382,684 (compared with $56,000 in 1996), and at the end of October, as the company geared up for its biggest season of the year, sales had already surpassed $350,000.

Since buying the company, Morrill also has received countless tour groups – school children, coach tours, Elderhostel members – all who visit the cheese company. In the process, she has gotten her cheese rap down.

The milk, she explains, is steam heated to 90 degrees as it flows from room-size storage tanks. (Her husband welded up the network of stainless steel tubing that transports milk in, and whey out of the production area.)

The coagulation process begins with one basic ingredient, rennet – the vegetable-derived kind used by State of Maine Cheese, rather than animal-derived. Huge stainless steel vats then heat the mix (100 degrees for jack cheese, 102 degrees for cheddar) to encourage the stirred-in bacterial culture to metabolize milk sugars into lactic acid. Cheese makers then drain off the whey, leaving behind curd that will age into one of the company’s 12 varieties of cheddar and seasoned jack cheeses.

The entire process fits neatly into an eight-hour day, handled primarily by production manager David Baker and apprentice cheese maker Dennis Young. The team spins through an age-old ritual that includes monitoring acid levels by drawing samples into pipettes, then salting and pressing the curd into wheels called daisies, which are cheesecloth-lined bins that squeeze out excess whey.

Baker is a watercolor artist who took on cheese making nine years ago to pay his bills, and who has since embraced the craft.

Morrill’s strategy since long before she bought the company has been to stick primarily to product lines offered by State of Maine Cheese. But Baker said the cheese is nevertheless a work in progress, improving in texture or flavor through six-month or yearlong steps. One project on the cheddar front has been dialing in the precise acidity of the cheese.

“We tend to go toward a little less acid and let the acid develop as it ages over time,” he said, wearing a rubber apron and knee boots, flipping lunchbox size slabs of cheddar curd. “I like it because it gives more of a depth of flavor.”

Baker and Young last year shoveled and pressed more than 70,000 pounds of Katahdin and Penobscot Cheddar, Allagash Caraway, Kennebec Dill, and other cheeses. That puts State of Maine near the head of the state’s dozen or so commercial cheese makers, and is a significant leap from the 16,000 pounds the company turned out each year when Morrill happened onto the operation.

Morrill said she spoons less capital into the operation each year, and break-even is within sight. The existing facilities could support double the production as demand grows, without additional equipment.

But the onslaught of ever-rising costs continually notches up the challenge. Swelling insurance costs forced Morrill earlier this year to drop health care coverage for her seven employees, among whom four, including Baker and Young, are full-time. And possibly the biggest question mark on the horizon is the escalating plight of Maine’s dairy farmers, struggling to survive against federally regulated milk prices.

If the worst happened, Morrill said, the business could survive on out-of-state milk. But the company’s State of Maine label is to her mind a declaration as much as a name.

“I bought this company because I like the romance of Maine,” she said. “Dairy farms are part of the ambiance here, and I would hate to see that be destroyed.”