Cheesemaking: Leveraging tradition for the future

Cheese is deeply rooted in Swiss culture, built on generations of knowledge about fermentation, cultures, ripening and craftsmanship. Now a Swiss creamery explores how cheesemaking can evolve into the future – while preserving the craft, know-how and traditions that make Swiss cheese so special. Building on this inherited knowledge, they developed a Swiss hard cheese made from locally grown lupins following a process like traditional cheesemaking: making (lupin) milk, fermenting it with cheese cultures, forming the wheels, smearing the rind and leaving them to ripen for months, monitoring, tasting and adjusting along the way. This requires patience, precision and the same cheesemaking skills that have been developed over generations. The main thing that is changed is the raw material: instead of animal milk from Swiss cows, the creamery uses plant milk made from lupins grown by Swiss farmers.

According to their crowdfunding pitch to scale up from experimental wheels to a product they can put on shelves, their goal is not only to make a hard cheese from lupins, but to build a Swiss value chain around it. This means, they are not trying to replace Swiss farmers, cheesemakers or cheesemaking infrastructure, but they build on what is already there, changing the raw material while keeping the knowledge, skills and as much of the local value creation as possible: Swiss farmers grow the lupins, which are processed locally and turned into lupin milk, and Swiss cheesemakers can then use their existing equipment, skills and knowledge to ferment and ripen it into cheese. This approach limits dependency on imported feed, reduces environmental harm, and avoids animal exploitation, all while aiming for a food system that preserves a valued craft, local traditions and the pleasure of eating cheese.

POV: This is what I think is lost in many discussions around plant-based alternatives, that such products can offer opportunities, that they do not have to be imperfect substitutes but appealing new products in their own right, that regions can leverage the reputation of their food and use local knowledge, skills and infrastructure to move forward, to continue old traditions by establishing themselves as producers of quality plant-based products that are not commodified but rooted in local culture – and that are therefore unique and typical enough so they can gain market shares and help sustain regional supply chains. For policy-makers to take measures that help local farmers with such transitions, and that help the food sector adapt, might be more constructive and forward-looking than e.g. banning yet another couple of “meat” or “dairy” terms on plant-based products.

Apart from New Roots that already make other lupin-based Swiss cheeses (raclette), other examples that come to my mind are e.g. Jay & Joy that make cashew-based French cheeses (e.g. a blue cheese), Pangea that make chickpea-based Italian cheeses (e.g. Gondino), or Rügenwalder that make pea-based German sausages (e.g. Pommersche). All of these products are distinct from the generic burgers and industrial cheeses that are sold widely in supermarkets already and – IMHO – show the way plant-based alternatives could evolve in terms of quality products with distinct and country-specific characteristics. (Needless to say, I have no financial or other links to these companies and I just mention their products here by way of example as I tried those already. If you have other examples, just post them in the comments – e.g. in Spain I already had decent plant-based morcilla and in Greece I had good plant-based Feta, even if I don’t remember the brands, and according to British sausage expert Mike Perry, in the UK there are good plant-based breakfast bangers… All of this is the more impressive given that it is only 10 years that novel plant-based alternatives entered the market at any scale.)

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