Gen Cheese

Avery Jones, 20, grew up among the clatter of cheese carts and the nutty scent of aging rooms, the rhythm of her parents’ creamery in Paso Robles, California, woven into her childhood. From the time she could walk, she helped package cheeses and played in the shadow of her family’s ambition.

Jones changed her mind in 2019 when her father, Reggie, identified a gap in the local market: Alpine-style sheep’s milk cheese, which requires eight months of aging. But the same year she opened Shooting Star, its first creation, Aries, a traditional Alpine-style cheese with “notes of buttermilk. Pineapple,” came in third place at the American Cheese Society awards, run by a nonprofit trade group and considered the Olympics for cheeseheads.

And while the average American cheesemaker is 41 years old and male, a growing wave of 20-somethings is reshaping the ancient trade by making. Selling cheese—blending sustainability, accessibility, and the energy and eccentricity of an increasingly online age. In Puglia, in Southern Italy, Vito Dicecca, 39, opened Baby Dicecca, a cheese bar and extension of his family’s 117-year-old cheese shop Caseificio Dicecca, in 2020.

But 27-year-old Kayleigh Boucher, a cheesemaker at Green Mountain Blue Cheese in Highgate, Vermont, is excited by new types of cheeses that a constellation of “tiny makers” from that state are creating. Boucher grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts and moved to Boucher Family Farm, her aunt and uncle’s farm in Vermont, in 2021 after graduating from Amherst College.

Her aunt Dawn kicked off Green Mountain Blue Cheese in 1999 as a self-taught maker, becoming one of the first artisanal blue cheese producers in the state. The farm’s signature French-style blue, Boucher blue, is its most popular, even winning second place in the molded blue category at the 2024 American Cheese Society National Judging and Competition event in Buffalo, New York—the only blue cheese from Vermont to do so.

Out of the 200 cows the family owns, Boucher’s favorite is a Jersey named Poppy who likes to be petted like a dog. Some are drawn to the fields of cheese expertise, such as cheese mongering, mastering cheese pairings, and judging cheese competitions (a dream job for people of any age). Madelyn Varela , 24, grew up in Arizona wanting to become a grower and eating “shitty brie.” At the age of five, she drew what she wanted to be when she grew up: a producer with cows.

After graduating from high school, Valera got under way her career at a dairy farm in Fountain Hills on the outskirts of Scottsdale, but she soon found herself captivated by what could be created from that milk and got under way experimenting with cheese recipes. Her favorite cheese is the Negroni blue cheese from Moro Formaggi in Italy, which is soaked in gin, sweet vermouth, and bitters for two months and topped with candied orange peels.

She added that while her favorite cheese “changes as often as the weather in the Midwest,” it’s at present the buttery and sweet Rispens Sheep Gouda by L’Amuse. In the Southern Welsh county of Monmouthshire, Lily Morris, 22, a cheesemonger at Morris’s of Usk , her family’s holding shop and cafe, knew early on that she was meant to work in cheese. Cheese and Marmite sandwiches were a fixture of her lunch boxes, and she recalls having constant headaches as a child. “The doctor said I was consuming too much cheese,” she laughs. “I was obviously meant to be in the cheese world!” Lily Morris of Morris’s of Usk in the UK.

In 2022, when her family assigned Morris to manage their new deli and cheese department, she created the Instagram account The Petite Cheese . In Puglia, in Southern Italy, Vito Dicecca , 39, opened Baby Dicecca, a cheese bar and extension of his family’s 117-year-old cheese shop Caseificio Dicecca , in 2020 “to highlight cheese as the star of the plate.” His siblings—Paolo, 42, Maristella, 34, and Roberta, 32—help run the shop. But in 2011, the then 24-year-old made a daring breakthrough with a masterpiece ahead of its time: Amore Primitivo , a blue cheese aged in Primitivo wine for 100 days and then crowned with a tangle of deep maroon cherries.