Martha Davis Kipcak of Martha’s Pimento: “It has been quite a ride.”
In a state that loves its cheese like Wisconsin does, how can a peppery, small-batch spreadable cheese — made with aged white cheddar from Red Barn Family Farms near Green Bay — not be a monster hit? Martha’s Pimento Cheese of Milwaukee launched five years ago, and even won a bronze in the “cheese-based spread” category at the 2017 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest. But in late 2017, founder Martha Davis Kipcak announced that final orders for her cheese would be made just before Christmas. If you’re lucky, you can find those last few containers at Whole Foods, Hy-Vee Fitchburg and both Metcalfe’s. (Full disclosure: Kipcak’s daughter is an employee of Isthmus.)
“We always made to order, never sat on any inventory,” says Kipcak. “We made by hand in small batches.”
Kipcak moved from Texas to Milwaukee 17 years ago. Not long after, she found herself a single mother needing to provide for her three children. She started with a small catering business, then — through a client — became involved in food justice issues. When she began thinking about opportunities for small food producers, the Southern tradition of pimento cheese came to mind: “It’s my foodway tradition. There was zero pimento cheese here at that point.”
In Kipcak’s slight drawl, the word sounds more like pimenta. In the South, says Kipcak, “it is literally everywhere, in public schools, in hospitals, in gas stations.” Wisconsin’s lack of pimento cheese seemed like “a no-brainer! Virgin territory!”
But the upper Midwest’s lack of knowledge about the concept — sharp cheddar mixed with mayonnaise and pimento peppers — was a challenge.
“When I would go out and do tastings in stores, 90 percent of people had never heard of pimento cheese,” says Kipcak. “They were like ‘What is it? What do you do with it?’” Ultimately, she figures, customers stuck with cheese they already knew.
Kipcak notes that Martha’s cost more than most of Wisconsin’s beloved cold-pack spreadable cheeses, because of the quality of her base ingredients — she even made her own mayonnaise, with GMO-free canola oil from Illinois and locally sourced eggs from free-range chickens.
“Some of the things that kept it from selling were choices I intentionally made, and in the end, even if it had gone gangbusters, I honestly don’t know that I would have continued,” says Kipcak. What could have made Martha’s a more profitable business — cranking out more for economy of scale — would have made it, essentially, no longer Martha’s Pimento.
Kipcak, who started the Milwaukee Food Council in 2007 to promote a more affordable, equitable, sustainable food system, hired young people from the city of Milwaukee, wanting to give them “career pathways — and I was able to do that. I felt in the end, I checked off all my boxes that I really set out to check. If I were to increase my volume, I wouldn’t have been able to stay at our small urban cheese factory in Milwaukee, or continue to hire locally.” Ultimately, she learned a lot about economic development in a local food system— “more than I ever have by reading white papers and going to conferences.”
Going forward, Kipcak is considering several new projects. Consulting with new small-production food businesses is in the mix, but she also wants to work on societal issues surrounding age, race and gender.
“It has been quite a ride,” says Kipcak. “Even I look back on those years and think, ‘The audacity! Martha, what were you thinking?’ But you muscle forward — you just do what needs to be done.”
