Mike Gingrich knows a thing or two about being an overnight success.
The hard work of his Dodgeville company, Uplands Cheese Co., flew under the radar for a few years until he showed up in 2001 at the American Cheese Society conference at Louisville, Ky., with one of the last wheels of the first batch he had made of Pleasant Ridge Reserve.
Gingrich had come to the conference looking for a market for his cheese, a grass-fed raw-milk product that was rare in the U.S. at the time. The cheese easily found that market when it won Best of Show at the conference’s contest, more or less winning the Oscar among artisanal cheesemakers. It has since been stocked in upscale cheese stores and on the menus of the finest restaurants in the U.S.
“It’s what really got us going,” Gingrich said. “We had to struggle for every order until winning that. Then we doubled production from the first year to the second, and doubled again from the second to third.”
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