Woolwich Dairy owners Tony and Olga Dutra will kick off the grand opening ceremony at 1:30 p.m. The public is invited and tours will be offered. Word has it that wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served. Whoo-hoo! Bring on the goat cheese.
Woolwich Dairy is southwest Wisconsin’s newest cheese production facility. In an announcement that will go out next week, the company reports it employs 15 people and sources milk from 120 area dairy farms from five states, with the majority of the milk coming from current and start-up goat dairies in Wisconsin.
The new 28,000 sq. ft. Lancaster cheese plant is the third production facility to be added to Woolwich Dairy’s operation, and the first in the United States. The plant will craft fresh, soft unripened goat cheese. Woolwich Dairy is a family-owned company which started in 1983. It has additional processing facilities in Ontario and Quebec.
“We are very pleased with the quality and volume of milk we’re sourcing from Wisconsin goat dairy farms. In fact, we’ve met and surpassed our initial projected numbers,” Domingues told me yesterday. “We look forward to aggressively growing our business in the United States and will continue to shift production from Canada to Wisconsin.”
Most excellent. Sounds like we’ll be seeing even more goat dairies popping up in southwest Wisconsin and more goat cheese made here, if Woolwich Dairy has its way. Sounds like a win-win to me.