St-Albert cheese curds travel the world
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 … For more of this story, visit Les editions Andre Paquette.
