Cowgirl Creamery is closing its doors in Point Reyes Station. The cheese-maker’s flagship shop, which has drawn visitors to a converted barn on Fourth Street for 25 years, will shutter on Sept. 5, leaving only a manufacturing facility in Petaluma to supply its thriving wholesale business.
Cowgirl was sold to Emmi, a Swiss dairy giant, in 2016. In February, the corporation merged it with Cypress Grove, another formerly independent cheese maker based in Humboldt County. Then, on July 18, a letter from Cowgirl informed its vendors that the company had taken the “incredibly difficult decision” to shut down the retail store.
“Given the environmental constraints of the property, we are not able to grow our cheesemaking operations nor properly service our customers in a comfortable manner over the long-term,” the letter read.
Emmi has swallowed numerous small cheese companies, including Sebastopol’s Redwood Hill Farm, and netted more than $4.1 billion in sales last year. A series of questions for Emmi’s American division were answered with a statement from Pamela Dressler, the managing director of Cowgirl and Cypress Grove.
“Point Reyes was the home of Cowgirl for many years, and it will always be a cornerstone of our story and who we are,” Ms. Dressler wrote, “but there have long been challenges with maintaining a retail shop and cheesemaking facility in this location.”
The building’s wastewater constraints were at the root of both problems Ms. Dressler cited: the lack of capacity to build new customer restrooms, and the inability to scale up production of Red Hawk cheese at the site to meet demand. The company also considered long-term water use, she said.
Sue Conley, who co-founded Cowgirl and sold it to Emmi six years ago, admitted wistfully that the closure was out of her hands. The cheese hasn’t changed since Emmi took over, she said, but the company has changed substantially. She suspected that the corporation, focused almost exclusively on production, simply lost interest in the complexities of managing a retail shop.
“I guess they had a hard time managing such a complicated business,” Ms. Conley said. “They don’t understand it.”
Sean McKee, the store’s general manager since December, said he was told Emmi wanted to focus on manufacturing rather than retail, but he knew little more. The staff learned on June 20 that they would be losing their jobs.
Mr. McKee, who moved to Petaluma from outside the state to take the job, said he was uncertain what he’d do next. “It’s a shame to see it,” Mr. McKee said. “I don’t think I’ll ever really know the reasons.”
Cowgirl was founded by Ms. Conley and her college friend Peggy Smith after the two moved to the Bay Area during the culinary revolution of the 1970s. Ms. Smith worked for 17 years at Chez Panisse, and Ms. Conley co-owned Bette’s Oceanview Diner, a Berkeley institution that closed, then quickly reopened as a co-op, earlier this year.
The pair bought the former Fourth Street feed barn from Toby Giacomini and first started making cheese there in 1997, inspired by artisanal English and French cheesemakers and West Marin’s high-quality organic milk. They focused on cheeses made with specific, single sources, like the high-protein, high-butterfat milk from Holstein cows at the Tresch Family Farm outside Petaluma.
Cowgirl’s website calls Red Hawk, a pungent triple-creme cheese with an ocher-colored rind, the “pride of Point Reyes Station.” The Petaluma facility, opened in 2016 on a nondescript industrial road off Lakeville Highway, now churns out the rest of the company’s cheeses, but Red Hawk has only ever been made at the barn. The cheese will be produced there until the end of the year, when the company’s lease runs out. Cowgirl is planning to produce it in Petaluma, but Ms. Conley feels the coastal conditions will be hard to recreate.
“There’s natural flora and yeast out here, and the weather is unique,” she said, which is important to the brining and aging processes. “I wish that they would call it something else, because I think it won’t be the same.”
For many years, the shop also sold cheese from other local producers, but it began to focus more on Cowgirl’s own lineup after the sale to Emmi. Ms. Conley and Ms. Smith stayed on as president and vice president until early 2021, when they both retired.
Cowgirl’s second shop, in San Francisco’s Ferry Building, closed soon after, a casualty of reduced foot traffic and ferry service during the pandemic. But as Point Reyes has continued to see a steady stream of weekend tourists, Cowgirl remains busy. The shop has long provided summertime work for short-term employees.
Kaly Kunst, who has worked at Cowgirl for three months but has been visiting much longer, said she cried when she heard the news. “It’s not efficient enough financially for them, and they don’t have the connection to it that we do,” she said.
Ms. Conley still owns the barn building and leases the space back to Cowgirl. The barn, renovated by architect Jon Fernandez, has second-story office spaces that she will continue to rent to a variety of tenants, including the Marin Resource Conservation District, a music teacher, artists and Mr. Fernandez himself. She hopes to find a new food company to occupy the ground floor, but continued cheesemaking could be tricky because of the property’s strained wastewater system.
In 2015, the California Coastal Commission greenlit a new two-story building and upgraded septic system at the site, striking down an appeal by Bridger Mitchell, president of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin. But Cowgirl ultimately shelved the new construction, which would have included an office and housing for a cheesemaker, due to a lack of funds.
The septic system got its major upgrade, but it is still pushed to its limits by cheese production, Ms. Conley said. For years, visitors haven’t been allowed to use the shop’s bathroom, which irks Point Reyes Station Village Association president Ken Levin. Cowgirl customers, along with those of other popular businesses like Bovine Bakery, have to visit the Mesa Road public bathrooms, which are already overburdened.
Mr. Levin said the village association’s response to Cowgirl’s closure would depend on whom Ms. Conley picks as her next tenant. “We can’t say anything ‘til we know what’s going in there next,” he said.