Giacomini Sisters Leading Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company
The Giacomini sisters, who operate the family-owned Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company, weren’t your typical farm kids. Sure, they grew up on California’s Tomales Bay, adjacent to Robert Giacomini Dairy, which their parents, Bob and Dean, purchased in 1959. But the siblings didn’t rise before daybreak to milk cows or dream of becoming dairy women.
Often, they even mistimed a daily chore: forgetting to retrieve the family’s milk from the bulk tank before the truck arrived, leaving the kitchen refrigerator empty of this fresher-than-fresh food.
“I’d say the only inkling back then that tied to our future was the fondness we shared for gathering at the dinner table, our love of food and its connection to the community and the land,” says Diana Giacomini Hagan, chief financial officer.
“Point Reyes is a small community. We had a large extended family, and there was a rich tradition of coming together over meals for holidays and celebrations. The broader West Marin community is an agricultural area. We were surrounded by fishermen, hunters, and other farmers. Much of the locally sourced food was traded amongst friends and neighbors. You never knew when somebody would stop by with fresh crab or a whole salmon or fruit from their pear tree. Food was part of everyday culture.Everyone bartered with each other and supported one another’s businesses,” she says.
The sisters left the farm to attend college. After graduation, they traded country life for the business world, pursued finance, sales, and marketing professions, and started families.
In 1998, deciding the fate of the family farm brought the sisters back to the dinner table with their parents. At the time, the Robert Giacomini Dairy operation spanned 720 acres, with a herd of 500-plus cows and a reputation for producing ultra-high-quality milk. With the sister’s father getting older, plus the challenge of low conventional milk prices and escalating input costs, one choice was to sell the farm. Instead, they all agreed to a fork in the road.
“Our dad looked at us that day and said, ‘What do you think about a value-added product, particularly cheese?‘” says Lynn Giacomini Stray, chief operating officer. “He thought if we turned the liquid product into something with a more profitable margin, we could keep the farm and have more family members get involved, ensuring the business would survive for future generations.”
“Our message to cheese fans is that families deserve to eat better, especially when it comes to agricultural products that come from family farms.”
— Lynn Giacomini Stray, chief operating officer
Cheese production was a “right time, right place” idea. A few years before, Peggy Smith and Sue Conley founded Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes and began purchasing milk from the nearby Straus Dairy Farm. The duo encouraged others to preserve the region’s rich agricultural heritage by making value-added dairy products on the farm, adding momentum to the new artisan cheese movement.
The family responded enthusiastically, and Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company was launched, making its first wheels of cheese on Aug. 1, 2000. Original Blue (still the company’s flagship product) was introduced to the trade at the Winter Fancy Food Show in January 2001 in San Francisco.
“We always say that cheese saved our family farm,” says Jill Giacomini Basch, chief marketing officer. “It was something we all had in common, and a passion for that returned to our love of food. Cheese is an immortal version of milk that brings people to the table. We had done a lot of travel, understood the link between food and culture, and wanted to create that for our family and our brand. The decision to make cheese brought Lynn and I together as founders, with sister Karen (Giacomini Howard), who was with us for the first decade and then retired, and sister Diana coming into the business in 2009.”
KING OF THE BLUES
The sisters chose blue for their first cheese as a wonderfully niche opportunity. They talked to chefs, retailers, distributors, and food writers for nearly a year as they researched and wrote their business plan.
A common theme emerged: little high-quality blue cheese was manufactured in the U.S., yet there was demand and an opportunity to fill it. Blue is one of the more complex cheeses to make, and as an aged cheese, the sisters would have to lock up much of their initial inventory investment for at least six months. It was a significant risk, but they were confident that blue cheese would fit the niche, especially culinary-wise, and would not accept defeat.
“We wanted culinary application to be a primary aspect of our marketing strategy. Blue cheese is something we wouldn’t have to explain. Yes, blue does appeal to a particular demographic of cheese lovers, but they get it. They know what blue cheese is and how to cook with it. With only one cheese in our repertoire, we developed tons of recipes to help market the cheese specifically to home cooks, as well as professional chefs,” says Basch.
Once they decided on blue, the sisters turned their attention to making the cheese. First, the family converted an old horse barn into a state-of-the-art cheese plant with a couple of 1,500-gallon vats.
Secondly, they hired an experienced cheesemaker from Maytag Dairy Farms. Maytag was the only domestically produced, nationally available, non-commercially branded, high-end table blue at the time. The introduction of Point Reyes Original Blue added something exciting, new, and niche-worthy.
The simple-yet-signature recipe called for grade A unpasteurized milk from the family’s born-and-raised green-pasture-grazed Holstein cows, a mix of salty Pacific Ocean breezes and coastal fog to lend a unique California flavor, and perfect timing. Original blue is made from milk only a few hours from the cow and aged three months. The result is a firm-yet-creamy, full-flavored blue with a perfectly balanced sweet-salty flavor.
“Those first batches were still aging when we booked meetings with distributors and retailers. We were young, naïve, and enthusiastic about telling our family story. We explained how our great-grandfather, Tobias Giacomini, immigrated to the U.S. from Italy in 1904, traveled to California in search of gold, and ended up poultry farming instead,” says Basch.
Basch says her grandfather continued in agriculture, starting his own dairy in 1944, where her father was raised.
“When we finished the story, the buyers were just as excited. They’d ask, ‘Well, where’s the cheese?’ and look on the floor for a cooler. We’d have to tell them we didn’t have any, as our first wheels weren’t quite ready. Cheese or not, they always remembered us because they remembered our story,” says Basch.
The sisters made only Original Blue for their first nine years in business. They were the only California blue, which helped get the name and brand out. The timing, a recurrent theme, was right as well.
In the early 2000s, chefs began writing where key ingredients came from, highlighting farm names on their menus. California’s star chefs of the day, Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower and Traci Des Jardins, all featured Point Reyes Original Blue on their menus.
Then, in November 2001, R.W. Apple Jr., a long-time writer for The New York Times, visited. The drop-in came the day after Apple dined at Chef Gary Danko’s namesake restaurant in San Francisco, where the writer enjoyed a platter of four California farmstead cheeses, of which Point Reyes Original Blue was one. The visit put the creamery on the cover of the food section under an article titled, “A New Normandy, North of the Golden Gate.” The piece equated the lands north of San Francisco as one of the best cheese-producing regions in the world.
Point Reyes Original Blue quickly gained popularity in retail, too. It’s been on Whole Foods Market’s core list, meaning it’s sold in every store nationwide since February 2001.
THE ROYAL COURT
Come 2009, Point Reyes’ first cheesemaker retired, and Kuba Hemmerling was hired as the creamery’s head cheesemaker. A year later, the company introduced its second cheese, Toma. The idea behind this farmer’s style semi-hard table cheese, with its buttery flavor, was to offer something for those who didn’t like blue. Thus, Toma wasn’t only a line extension, but also reached a new customer base. Toma instantly became a crowd-pleaser and a platform for innovation.
Cognizant of the consumer demand trend for vibrant flavors, the sisters experimented through R&D, along with their culinary director, Jennifer Luttrell, who heads up The Fork, the creamery’s culinary and education center.
In 2018, they launched three flavors of Toma: TomaProvence, TomaRashi and TomaTruffle, which earned first place in the American Cheese Society’s 2024 American Originals with Flavor Added All Milk category.
“We wanted a uniqueness for these flavors to stand out and not paint us as doing what everybody else was doing,” says Hagan.
And truffles, adds Lynn, “truffles aren’t a trend anymore, but an everyday flavor profile that people look for.” She added, “We chose to partner with the Sabatino family in Umbria, Italy, to ensure TomaTruffle was absolutely a showstopper.”
Last year, the creamery added two more outstanding flavored cheeses. One is Truffle Brie, which also uses truffles from Sabatino. The second is Fennel Blue, where fennel seeds are added to the company’s acclaimed Bay Blue, a mellow-flavored, rustic-style, fudgy-textured cheese with a sweet, salted caramel finish.
Innovation doesn’t stop at flavors. The sisters released Quinta, a soft-ripened, bloomy-rind cheese, in 2020. Quinta is wrapped in California Bay Laurel-infused spruce bark and reveals a spreadable interior when the top is cut off, making it a unique addition to their cheese portfolio.
LET THEM EAT GOOD CHEESE
Today, Point Reyes Farmstead has two creameries, the second of which was built in 2018 in nearby Petaluma. Original Blue, the company’s only raw milk cheese, continues to be made on the farm in Point Reyes, exclusively from the milk produced on the family’s farm.
The pasteurized cheeses, including the Toma family, Bay Blue, Gouda, Quinta, and Truffle Brie, are handcrafted in Petaluma, where the milk is sourced from neighbors who share a similar sustainable farming ethos to the Giacomini sisters. Seven cheesemakers and two cheesemaking crews total work at both facilities.
The next generation, Stray’s son Miles, is learning all aspects of the company.
Looking ahead, Stray says, “One of the most important things to us is education and getting our cheese in people’s mouths. We don’t want to be a specialty cheese for special occasions. We want to lift people’s palates so they reach out for great quality handcrafted artisan cheese, rather than commodity cheese from the dairy wall. Really good cheese adds so much flavor in so many ways, from simple cheeseboards to burgers, pasta, salads, risotto, or elevated white tablecloth menus. Our message to cheese fans is that families deserve to eat better, especially when it comes to agricultural products that come from family farms.”
