Dairy is such a prominent aspect of Wisconsin and without people behind the scenes helping to create those products, we wouldn’t be able to buy them so easily at the store. One of those people is Roger Krohn, a third-generation Wisconsin cheesemaker who has been in the industry since he can remember. “Between eighth grade and freshmen year of high school I started working that summer on the bottom of the totem pole like everybody else did here in packaging,” he said. Krohn explained that back then he was paid minimum wage, which was $1.60/hour and he still enjoyed it. This lead to him taking classes on cheesemaking at the Center for Dairy Research in Madison, receiving his cheesemaker’s license at 18, and continuing to turn milk into cheese ever since.
Krohn now has over 45 years of experience and is certified as a Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker in mozzarella and provolone. Along with that, he’s also the Cheese Technical Manager for the Luxemburg, WI location of Agropur.
His family has a long history of cheesemakers and is still going strong today. “My family started this way back in 1892,” said Krohn. He explained that his Great-Great-Uncle built the plant and then hired his Grandpa, Charles Krohn, as his first cheesemaker at this same site in Luxemburg. At the time the plant was a small cheddar facility but eventually grew into what it is today. In 1908 his grandpa bought the plant and it was in the family until 2000 when they chose to sell, but Roger decided to stay. He’s a very optimistic man because as sad it was to see the family sell the plant, one positive that came from it is that he was able to enroll in the Master Cheesemaker program and focus on perfecting his skill.
As he brought up the history of his family and the facility, Krohn also spoke about how things have changed over the years for the cheese industry and for dairy in general. “This is how the industry has changed. You see bigger cheese plants, you see bigger farms, and it’s not just the dairy industry, you see it in a lot of industries where there’s consolidation,” he went on to say, “at one point, when our family still owned the plant, we had about 330 dairy farmers that we bought milk from and we took in maybe 200-250,000 pounds of milk a day.” That seems like quite a bit until he explained that today they get milk from only about 100 dairy farms and are taking in around 3.7 million pounds of milk per day. Consolidation over the years is a perfect example of a drastic change.
Besides the obvious change of smaller dairies and cheese factories going out of business and others growing, there are more aspects of the industry that are transforming as well. For example, when he was growing up in the business it was a lot more labor-intensive, but now automation has become a key asset that does a good amount of the manual work for you. Even with the technology upgrades, that doesn’t take away from the scientific and artistic side of making cheese. Krohn still has to set the programs up that add the ingredients to make the cheese. He still has to tell the machines what to do and if he doesn’t get it correct, he doesn’t have a successful end product.
“That’s where the art is still there. Even though there’s a lot of mechanization in this business now, the computers can only do what a person tells them to do,” says Krohn, “There’s a component to cheesemaking that’s science and there’s a component that’s art and you have to mesh those two to make the best cheese you can.”
One of the cheeses they have to be very careful with making is the mozzarella. He was talking about how before they started making mozzarella, an Italian man was talking to his dad and suggested that they start. The problem was that in the 60s there wasn’t nearly as much pizza being eaten as there is today and there weren’t many pizzerias in the Green Bay area. Although that was the case, his dad still chose to dabble in creating mozzarella, and in the 70s it blew up into the popular cheese giant that everyone knows today.
Overall, Krohn brought up how he loves the industry and has a passion for making cheese because he’s constantly learning about the scientific side of cheesemaking, along with remembering the artistic side. For example, with mozzarella one challenge he has is making sure that the cheese stretches perfectly on the pizza and only browns a little bit, while also remembering that various ovens cook pizza differently. There’s a fine balance that’s needed to create the perfect product.
“In this business, I’ve been doing this for like 45 years or more now and you really never stop learning because ya know, you take milk and you convert it into cheese and it’s not like a static product, it’s always changing. Ya know, milk changes, the components in milk change during the course of the year. In summer when it’s hot out your solids in your milk drop and that’s a challenge to make adjustments to your cheese recipe to make the cheese the same as it is in fall and winter and early spring when your solids are much higher in the milk.”
There are always challenges when it comes to being a cheesemaker, but it’s also a growing industry with a demand for more cheesemakers. If you love a challenge, you love science, and you love being creative, this might be the career move you need to consider.
Thank you to all of the cheesemakers in Wisconsin, we appreciate you!
To hear the entire interview with Roger Krohn, check out our podcast page. We take a deeper dive into the cheesemaking process and also Krohn talks about his opinions on the alternative dairy products being sold in today’s market.
