Fromagerie coopérative St-Albert ships cheese curds as far away as Japan, Barbados and Abu Dhabi. It’s a small village business preparing an iconic eastern Ontario – and Canadian – foodstuff that feeds Canadians in diverse food cultures thousands of kilometres around the world.
“To make poutine for Canada Day, embassies reach out to us each year and there might be a dozen or so places we ship to. They pay for it, we bring it to the airport, and then they fly it in,” says St-Albert business development director Éric Léveillé.
That curdled milk is a craving for Canadians in foreign lands is somehow fitting – and that it is inspired by a humble cheese curd from a 130-year-old dairy in a 150-year-old eastern Ontario village is, well, inspiring in itself.
Celebrating more than a century in business this year, the Fromagerie, owned by about 35 member farms (and roughly 80 individuals), is a prime contender for the oldest French-language cooperative in Canada.
Dairy operations began in 1894 when Louis Génier and nine partners each ponied up a $12 membership buy-in and founded the St-Albert Cheese Cooperative. The Co-op’s Cheddar, when first made in the late 1800s, was called simply “St-Albert.”
It’s a solid part of Canadian diary history, a multibillion-dollar industry that began in the time of Champlain when French settlers brought their cattle here with them and continued for nearly 250 years, until the mid-1800s when dairy thrived as a cottage industry with hundreds of small processors in villages and hamlets across the country.
Even by the early-1900s, long before there were refrigerators in homes, there was a multitude of creameries and cheese factories in towns across Ontario and Quebec.
Compared to impersonal multi-national mega-corporations like Saputo, St-Albert has retained its quaint and home-based orientation, the town’s primary employer adamantly refusing to let a major fire in 2013 deter them and remaining undaunted in the face of Big Cheese’s dominance in the market.
The fact remains that St-Albert is likely the largest independent cheese curd-manufacturer in the country after Saputo, according to Léveillé.
The ratios are startling: from a small farm village in The Nation (a population of just 13,000) situated 50 kilometres southeast of Ottawa and 15 minutes from Casselman and Embrun, the St-Albert factory employs about 220 people and makes cheese seven days a week, anywhere from eight to 12 tons of cheese curds every single day.
That’s a lot of poutine, the iconic Canadian dish that requires the squeaky-chewing curds to set it off fully.
St-Albert’s cheesemaking awards testify to quality, including grand champion at the 2013 British Empire Cheese Show, the year a perhaps symbolic coincidence with the fire.
The rebuild from the ashes a decade ago meant much bigger and more modern cheese production with an observation deck, restaurant and retail space that essentially doubles the company’s space.
Their cheese curds head to all ten Canadian provinces and three territories.
“We ship to Nunavut every week. That wouldn’t have been the case 10 years ago,” Léveillé says, adding that a deal with Costco has helped their growth and helped maintain staffing levels.
At a chain grocer that I frequent here in Rockland, there is a high-visibility display stocked with two items only: St-Albert Cheddar and cheese curds right at the front of the check-out aisles.
“Rockland is actually a very high-level region for us for selling cheese curds and Cheddar blocks, as is Hawksbury, Alexandria, Casselman and Embrun. Eastern Ontario rural towns are very good regions for us,” Léveillé says.
As a food, poutine’s growth in popularity has been another boon to St-Albert’s business: just about every restaurant has some sort of version and interpretation of the popular dish which has propelled growth for the cheesemaker.
It should be noted that the St-Albert cheese curds you find in grocery stores are slightly different from the “fresh” St-Albert curds that food operations use for poutine, which are smaller, less salty and contain a bit more fluid.
Despite the 130 years, the St-Albert process is still much the same, according to Léveillé, including cheddaring the cheese (cutting, layering, pressing), milling and salting it and turning 18-kg blocks by hand for proper aging, all labour-intensive steps.
But he notes that the hands-on work of the St-Albert employees represents a century of tradition that has allowed the fromagerie to maintain the texture and flavour of a product like their cheese curds which consumers have grown to appreciate and demand.
“The only way that we can stand out as a cheesemaker is by having a product that is more traditional and more tasty,” Léveillé says. “I think it’s a point of pride for the people living in St-Albert, too. When it comes to cheese curds, we’re pretty big.”
