Ready for your crash course in trans Atlantic cheese shipment? Here we go!
Step 1: Five weeks before our scheduled arrival date we email our cheese importer our order.. Cheese is imported on a file system—52 files per year corresponding to the 52 weeks.
Step 2: Our importer starts the process by sending the order to France where the cheese is eventually consolidated at an enormous market called Rungis. There it is consolidated with our British farmhouse cheeses and any of the other European cheeses we pre-order
Step 3: Time to set sail! The cheese is in a refrigerated container for it’s voyage across the Atlantic. The cheese then lands at the port of Newark in NJ
Step 4: Our cheese hitches a ride to a warehouse in Long Island City New York where it meets up with some other products we’ve ordered. All of that product is consolidated onto a single pallet just for us!
Step 5: A truck cruises by that warehouse on a Friday morning and brings our pallet BACK to a different warehouse New Jersey (oh the tolls!). At that warehouse it is place with a truckload of pallets bound for the Midwest
Step 6: Early on a Tuesday morning the most enormous 18 wheeler you’ve ever seen arrives in our parking lot. We climb in and unload 1,000-2,000 pounds worth of product from the back of the truck.
If everything goes according to plan we receive cheese four weeks from the time we send the email. This results in cheese that is actually a little on the young side (don’t tell anyone but we get our cheese faster/fresher than anyone in the cities).
Of course I am here to tell you that there are so many ways this can go wrong and 2021 has been filled with the most shipping challenges we’ve ever encountered. COVID-19 delays, staffing shortages at the port, congestion at the port, rough seas, lack of freight, lack of truckers. You name it, we’ve seen it. Oh, and once the cheese is picked in Europe, we own it . Doesn’t matter if our ship gets lost in the Bermuda triangle—we’re paying for that cheese.
But look again at that picture up there. It’s totally worth it when you can sell someone an absolutely perfect piece of soft French cheese—there’s just nothing quite like it.