Cheese So Good…It Made Me Cry
By: Tom Johnson
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Business, Entrepreneurship, Failure

Cheese So Good…It Made Me Cry

Business failure and the durability of the stories we tell ourselves

Photo by Tom Johnson

Last year, a Gouda cheese I designed won a medal at the U.S. Championship Cheese Contest. I was initially thrilled. The competition is the country’s largest and most important technical judging event.

But my delayed response to the award caught me by surprise and taught me about the durability of the stories we tell ourselves as we muddle through our daily lives.

Designing award-winning cheeses is not new to me. Together my wife and I launched more than 20 cheeses, all award winners, under the Bingham Hill label. We won several medals at previous U.S. and World Championships, and in 2005, we won the most awards of any U.S. cheesemaker at the World Cheese Awards in London.

This particular cheese represented my first step toward re-envisioning the products made and sold to the public at the university where I worked. It was a traditional Gouda coated with a yellow rind and aged on wooden shelves. The cheese replaced the university’s previous Gouda, a vacuum-sealed puck that lacked flavor and character.

It had been a while since I’d had my hands in a cheese vat, but my success at the competition didn’t surprise me. I knew the cheese was good enough to win.

After learning of the award, my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate. She congratulated me and told me how proud she was of me. Then she said something that caught me off guard.

“It shows that it was you,” she said. “It wasn’t a fluke.”

I knew what she meant. In response, a wave of emotion washed over me. Despite my efforts to hold back, I broke down there in a busy restaurant and had to cover my face to hide my tears.

Beginnings

In 1999, with no experience and no formal cheesemaking education, my wife and I started an artisanal cheese company in Fort Collins, Colorado. Bingham Hill Cheese Company rocketed to fame when our first cheese, a natural rind, raw milk blue called Rustic Blue, won a gold medal at the American Cheese Society competition in Napa Valley.

For the next seven years, my wife and I put everything we had into our company — and by outward appearances, we were wildly successful. Our cheeses won awards by the bushel. Our faces and our products graced newspapers, magazines, books, and TV shows. Our cheeses were sold in the best shops and served in the best restaurants from coast to coast. The publicity we received bordered on embarrassing.

Behind the scenes, however, we exhausted everything around us: our bank accounts, our relationships, our marriage, and ourselves.

Bingham Hill was always living on borrowed time. Our products were good but temperamental. Our production was inefficient. Our makeshift plant was held together with duct tape and bailing wire. We needed help.

After a promising deal with Trader Joe’s went south, it appeared we were out of options — at which point, there was nothing left to do but burn the company down. Thus began our strange odyssey of wrapping things up.

There were the layoffs, the eBay auctions, the surreal theft of our recipes and methods by a former employee. Then came the calls from creditors, the lawsuits, the moves across the country to find employment, and the moves back to find ourselves. At each stage, we would gather the ashes in our hands and try to mold them into something meaningful.

When the dust settled, we moved on. But despite the appearance of a new calm in our lives, a place in the back of my mind stayed busy analyzing and re-analyzing what went wrong. I second-guessed my decisions and my actions. I wallowed, self-flagellated, and regretted. I had it down to an art form. I wore our failure like a brand.

Just as I had allowed our success to integrate with my identity, the loss of our company was my failure, and by extension, I was a failure.

The most prominent artifact I carried away from Bingham Hill was a lingering self doubt. In my mind, the fact that we had won nearly fifty national and international awards for our products was meaningless. Just as I had I allowed our success to integrate with my identity, the loss of our company was my failure, and by extension, I was a failure. As a proven failure, it couldn’t possibly have been me who created those products and won those awards.

Or maybe it was a fluke, I would tell myself. Maybe the cheeses weren’t that good. Times were different then. The industry was younger and less sophisticated. Expectations were lower. Our inexperience gave us an unfair advantage, since our lack of preconceptions led to accidental innovation. That didn’t mean I was a good cheesemaker.

Turning the page

So that was the backdrop in front of which I designed my first cheese in more than a decade. I went about it the same way as I had in the past. I consulted books and articles. I sketched out trial recipes. I tasted everything I could get my hands on, trusting my palette above all. When ready, I bounced my final plans off of friends, steeled myself, and then boldly took the plunge.

The process worked as it always had. The cheese is really good, and winning a medal was a pleasant validation of that fact.

More important than winning the award, however, was what it taught me about myself. The words my wife uttered provided a precious glimpse into the vestigial trauma I carried with me despite the passage of time. Wounds still smoldered. Unpleasant emotions lurked, affecting my work, my relationships, and coloring everything in my field of vision.

My wife’s words helped me see the world as it really is, not as I had constructed it. Those few syllables gave me permission to get on with the healing process and let those constructs go. This was a gift, and I was grateful to receive it.

It was me. It wasn’t a fluke. And now I can move on.

Read more about the failure of our company—and the lessons I learned from our failure—in the story below.