Every business has an origin story. This one starts with cheese, but it was never really about cheese.

It’s about:
A Swiss immigrant.
A cheese factory.
A garage fulfillment center.
A company sold.
A company bought back.

It starts in 1919, when my great-grandfather immigrated from Switzerland and built a cheese factory in northern Wisconsin, before there were even proper roads. It moves through my grandfather, who scaled Twin Town Cheese into the largest producer of hard Italian cheeses in the United States. Then to my father, who carried that same instinct into new ventures, including a renewable energy company built around cheese waste.

Enterprise wasn’t a career path in my family. It was a condition.

So I grew up assuming I’d build something of my own, not because I had a plan, but because I didn’t want to live inside someone else’s. After starting a journalism career abroad, I came back to Wisconsin to help my father launch that energy company.

The energy company failed.

Although it felt like a dead end, in hindsight, it was my first real lesson in business: Ambition doesn’t reward scale first. It rewards proximity. Start closer to the ground. Limit the downside. Build something you can actually hold.

Not long after, I connected with Gene, a family friend, a mentor, and in many ways, a second father. He ran a cut-and-wrap cheese operation with constant overflow: extra product, inconsistent weights, inventory no one quite knew what to do with. It looked like excess, but it felt like opportunity.

Not just an opportunity to sell cheese, but a chance to reimagine how it was presented. Because the more I looked at the industry, the more something seemed overlooked. Millions invested in production, yet almost nothing invested in the story. Even if the product was good, it had no voice. No relatability. No people behind the product. No purpose in its packaging.

At the same time, craft beer was exploding. You could pick up a can and read about two guys who started a brewery with nothing but a dream. Cheese wasn’t doing that.

So I started asking:
Why doesn’t it feel personal?
Why doesn’t it carry identity?
Why doesn’t it mean something?

That awareness became the beginning of Cheese Brothers.

At first, it was just an idea. No name, no logo, no design, until I found Rev Pop.

“Eric, you and Gene are brothers by cheese, not birth,” Scott Starr said.

That line didn’t just name the company; it defined it. It wasn’t just packaging. It was perspective. For the first time, I could see the business before it existed.

We built Cheese Brothers the hard way: festivals, pop-ups, a retail store at the Mall of America. Forty markets a year across the country. Truck. Booth. Breakdown. Repeat. It worked, but it wasn’t sustainable. I maxed out two credit cards, and I didn’t take more than two days off in two years. It was brutal. I was tired. My body hurt. I couldn’t scale up, but I also couldn’t scale down.

Then everything stopped.

March 2020. One show canceled. Then another. Then all of them. I called Gene and asked if he had any warehouse jobs available. It was over. How do you sell direct-to-consumer cheese, with toothpick samples at crowded markets, in the middle of a pandemic?

You don’t.

In an act of desperation, I posted a photo of my trailer full of cheese on Facebook and said I’d ship it to anyone who ordered. It was a going-out-of-business sale, although I didn’t say that out loud.

That day: $3,000 in sales. The next day: double. Then double again. For every dollar we spent, we made twenty back. Within days, I was packing orders out of my dad’s garage. Freezers humming. Boxes stacking. Eighteen-hour days.

While the world was shutting down, something else was opening. People weren’t just buying cheese. They were sending something they couldn’t give in person: presence. A gesture that said, I’m thinking of you. Cheese became a vehicle for meaning, an edible greeting card.

That’s when the business changed.

Direct-to-consumer wasn’t just a channel. It was a relationship. Every order had a reason. Every package carried intent. The question was no longer how to sell cheese; it was how to create connection in a disconnected world.

In 2021, we sold the company.

It was a mistake. What we had built began to come apart. Decisions became transactional. The details that made it unique started to disappear. I had spent my entire life avoiding exactly that outcome, and handed it over anyway. It broke something in me. For two years, I lived with that decision, but I never let go of the belief that we could get it back.

Eventually, we did.

Now, in 2026, we’ve never been in a better position. The clarity is different this time. There’s no five-year plan. No over-engineered roadmap. Just a clear sense of what matters, and what needs to happen next.

Because risk never goes away. You don’t outgrow it. You learn to recognize it as the environment you operate in. You breathe into it—and move forward anyway.

Today, if you call Cheese Brothers, you’ll hear it immediately:

A real voice.
A real person.
A northern Wisconsin accent that hasn’t been filtered or outsourced.

That’s intentional.

Because this was never just about cheese. It was about building something that feels familiar. Something human. Something personal. Something worth sending. The product just happens to be cheese. Damn good cheese, in fact.

Everything else?

It’s a business born out of an unlikely brotherhood—one that started to succeed, almost shut down, started again, was sold, bought back…And began again.

Brothers through cheese. Built on risk. Bound by story.