Redhead Creamery is a farmstead, award-winning, artisan cheese plant located on a family-owned dairy farm in Central Minnesota. Alise Sjostrom, owner and founder (and natural redhead), grew up on Jer-Lindy Farms along with her three redheaded sisters. She always dreamed of taking over the farm and told her parents, Jerry and Linda Jennissen, that she wasn't going to milk cows. At 16, on a national 4-H trip to a farmstead cheese plant in Wisconsin, the idea for Redhead Creamery began.
At the University of Minnesota she created her own major in dairy production and food marketing. She met her future husband, and fellow dairy farm kid, Lucas Sjostrom, who proposed in front of the beef barn on campus. After college, Alise and Lucas traveled the country visiting every farmstead creamery they could find and began making plans. Alise got her Artisan Cheesemaking License from the University of Vermont and has worked for some of the largest artisan cheese companies in the country. When they moved back to the Midwest, Crave Brothers in Wisconsin, the creamery she visited at 16 on that 4-H trip, made a marketing position just for her.
By 2012, more than a decade after she first announced her future cheese plans to her parents, Lucas and Alise started making plans to head back home to her family farm in Minnesota and start our their family. Now the real work was about to begin.
Alise wanted to build a cheesemaking facility right on her family farm, where she could have full control of the milk from feed to cheese. To held fund the enormous cost of moving existing farm structures, building a new milk pipeline, and constructing a brand-new cheese plant and storage caves, Alise turned to Kickstarter. Thanks to the support of many people, including complete strangers, Alise was able to raise $41,000. These funds were used as seed money to secure the loans and grants needed to fully fund the facility.
Finally, construction on Redhead Creamery began. Milk flowed into the cheese room from the milk parlor for the first time in the fall of 2014, and Alise's first batch of Cheddar went into the caves that Halloween day.
Today, Redhead Creamery makes cheese 2-3 days a week and have expanded to include an on-site cheese shop. Alise's cheeses have won numerous awards from the American Cheese Society, Good Food Awards and the Minnesota State Fair.
Find Redhead Creamery cheeses in the Specialty Cheese Department.