The Cowgirl Creamery building will be the new home of Wild West Ferments and a local food market after selling last month for $4.1 million. Cowgirl’s retail cheese shop closed in September after 25 years in downtown Point Reyes Station, and owners Peggy Smith and Sue Conley listed the former feed barn now called Tomales Bay Foods. It caught the eye of Marcel Houtzager, a Ross-based money manager who had been looking to help Wild West Ferments relocate.
“It’s an important transaction locally and a really iconic building,” said Mr. Houtzager, a Marin Agricultural Land Trust donor who owns Black Mountain Ranch. “The history of this building is going to continue in the original vision of Peggy and Sue.”
Mr. Houtzager bought the building with a partner, Steve Swire, and will rent the space out to West Marin Ferments. In the spring, the barn’s ground floor will become a retail space selling local products like cheese and flowers, and the cheesemaking area will become a fermentation kitchen where Luke Regalbuto and Maggie Beth Levinger will produce their sauerkrauts and probiotic pickles.
Mr. Regalbuto and Ms. Levinger, who founded the company in 2010, were once tenants at Black Mountain Ranch, where they cultivated an orchard. Their fermentation business bounced from a shared kitchen in Inverness to one in Woodacre before the couple finally found their own space, a clapboard storefront on Bodega Avenue in Petaluma that formerly housed the De Schmire Restaurant.
They stayed for seven years as their business grew from a stand at the Point Reyes Farmers Market to the shelves of more than 200 stores across California. But during the pandemic, their landlord alerted them of plans to sell the building, and they began searching for a permanent facility in West Marin.
At first, Mr. Regalbuto and Ms. Levinger considered moving into a barn at Black Mountain Ranch. The fermenters would have joined a thriving, inventive community that has coalesced on the property Mr. Houtzager bought last year for $8.8 million. Molly Myerson runs Little Wing Farm, growing veggies, flowers and quail eggs at the ranch. Loren Poncia grazes cattle from Stemple Creek Ranch there, and Rebecca Burgess grows natural pigments like indigo and marigold with the nonprofit Fibershed, which hosts regular workshops. Arron Wilder grows some of Table Top Farm’s vegetables on the land, Danny Vitali grows sage and lavender on a rocky slope and Ido Yoshimoto has a space for woodworking.
Yet ost and septic constraints stopped West Marin Ferments from moving into the barn, and Mr. Regalbuto and Ms. Levinger soon heard that local food producers were making offers on the Tomales Bay Foods building. Mr. Houtzager and Mr. Swire were willing to provide the money.
The building began life as a dirt-floored feed barn. In 1997, Ms. Conley and Ms. Smith bought the barn from Toby Giacomini and transformed it with help from architect Jon Fernandez into the heart of West Marin’s burgeoning cheese industry. It served as both Cowgirl’s production facility and a gourmet market. Cowgirl continued to produce Red Hawk cheese there even after opening a factory in Petaluma and selling to a Swiss dairy conglomerate in 2016. But this summer, the corporation, Emmi, announced it would shut down the store. Ms. Smith and Ms. Conley still owned the building and initially hoped to find another food company tenant, but locals began approaching them with purchase offers. They soon settled on Mr. Houtzager and Mr. Swire because of their plans to bring in West Marin Ferments.
“Their vision is a beautiful vision that carries on the tradition of how the barn started in ‘97,” Ms. Smith said. “We are very excited for them.”
Mr. Regalbuto and Ms. Levinger foresee a “regional food hub” in the former Cowgirl space, with goods from established and up-and-coming food producers. Cheese will certainly be among the offerings. But Wild West will need to do some work before opening its first retail shop. The company, which employs six people, is busiest on weekdays, fermenting in ceramic crocks and shipping, while the busiest hours at the retail store will come on weekends.
The production space at Tomales Bay Foods will be slightly smaller than the Petaluma kitchen, but the direct-to-consumer store will allow Mr. Regalbuto and Ms. Levinger to experiment with smaller batches of more varied seasonal ferments and tonics, instead of the large batches of just a few popular cabbage ferments that they currently send to markets.
“We don’t really want to grow our production,” Ms. Levinger said. “We want to basically stay the same size but sell a lot more of our product direct-to-consumer, and this space is perfect for that.”
Although the building underwent a major septic upgrade in recent years, Cowgirl’s water-intensive cheesemaking process still pushed the building’s wastewater capacity. Wild West will produce much less wastewater, since much of the water used in the fermentation process is packaged into jars as brine.
Mr. Regalbuto and Ms. Levinger intend to move into the space by February and open the retail operation soon after. The building’s upstairs office tenants, including Mr. Fernandez and the Marin Resource Conservation District, will stay put.