Pleasant Lane Farms takes home 1st place in World Dairy Expo for gouda cheese

Pleasant Lane Farms in Unity had a gouda showing at this year’s World Dairy Expo — literally.

The Creamery at Pleasant Lane Farms received four medals, including a first place win for its 1976 reserve gouda cheese. Its cheddar cheese curds placed second, its buffalo ranch cheese curds placed third and its German-style spreadable quark cheese placed second.

The World Dairy Expo is the world’s largest dairy-focused trade show, and it’s held each year in Madison, Wis. Farmers can enter a variety of dairy products, including cheese, milk, cottage cheese, sour cream, ice cream and frozen yogurt in various categories.

Jason Frye, owner of Pleasant Lane Farms, said the results, especially for the gouda, were a win for the creamery.

“We’ve watched that cheese score well at (other competitions)… for it to finally sort of break through the barrier and place first for us was a really big thing,” Frye said.

The reserve gouda’s nod to 1976 represents the year Frye’s parents founded the farm, he said. And the creamery has another cheese — the 1795 Reserve Cheddar — that pays homage to when the Frye family began farming in Westmoreland County.

“Someday, maybe our kids will name a cheese the 2020 because that was the year we started the creamery,” Frye said.

Frye said the farm entered its first competition in January 2022 following the height of the covid pandemic. This year was the farm’s second year entering dairy products into the World Dairy Expo.

The main reason Frye said the farm started competing was to receive unbiased feedback from industry professionals.

“We then take that feedback to help tweak our products to help make them better,” Frye said.

He said he’s seen improvement in the creamery products by making the suggested changes.

In the World Dairy Expo specifically, Frye said farmers send their products, and the judging happens ahead of the actual expo, which is scheduled for early October.

Farms are then notified of their results, and Frye said Pleasant Lane was invited to attend the awards ceremony in Wisconsin during the expo.

“We think it would be fun to go out and sort of represent Pennsylvania,” Frye said.

When the products are judged, Frye said the expo doesn’t judge a specific cheese against other cheeses. Each cheese starts out with a perfect score and deductions are made from there, according to Frye.

Pleasant Lane’s 1976 Reserve Gouda received a 99.9, which means it only got a 0.1 deduction.

It means a lot to Frye that his creamery is doing well compared to “some of the best artisan makers in the world,” as well as Wisconsin-based cheesemakers in their hometown competition.

“I think, for small manufacturers like us, outside of the feedback, if you are sort of lucky enough to place in some of these classes — it does open doors to retail channels for you,” Frye said.

Over the last year, Frye said the creamery was picked up by a national retailer on the East Coast, and the farm has been trying to garner more national attention for its 1976 Reserve Gouda.

Oftentimes, he said manufacturers will be contacted for samples of products that have been pre-juried during competitions such as the World Dairy Expo because that usually proves that they’re good products.

“You definitely get some notice as the trade journals start picking up who won a class — big retailers will look,” Frye said.

And placing in multiple competitions helps, too.

“That’s where we start to build confidence that the product we’re producing really is world-class.”