Roth Käse creates cheeses in Wisconsin’s Green County, where it says the freshest U.S. milk supply is available.

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So much about the Monroe, Wis.-based specialty cheese maker Roth Käse USA Ltd., seems European, but President Steve McKeon feels his company’s American niche is what gives it its edge.

The 16-year-old corporation’s origins trace back to Switzerland in 1863, when Oswald Roth began a cheese crafting and curing company. His son, Otto Roth, emigrated to the U.S. in 1911 and went on to develop Otto Roth & Co., which Roth Käse says soon became the largest importer of European specialty cheeses in the Unites States.

In 1991, Fermo Jaeckle, an executive at Roth & Co., partnered with his cousins Felix and Ulrich Roth and founded Roth Käse USA Ltd.

Now, a traditional Swiss-made copper vat creates the award- winning company’s original cheeses in “Little Switzerland,” or Wisconsin’s Green County, where Roth Käse says the freshest U.S. milk supply is available. Though European in its style and roots, McKeon says Roth Kase has a lead on European importers.

“We’re closer to the market,” McKeon says. “We didn’t have to order product overseas or ship it across the ocean.

“We didn’t have to deal with the ports in order to get a product out of containers to customers,” he adds.

Early Struggles
The company began at a disadvantage, McKeon says, because it wasn’t privy to the subsidies European exporters were allowed.”The prices of imported cheeses were not that much different than U.S.-produced products,” McKeon says. “The reason being, a great deal of subsidies were given to manufacturers in Europe to export in other countries. This made us noncompetitive and stifled our ability to sell to the traditional retail trade. So, we created distinctive cheeses with innovative packaging and targeted the foodservice customers.”

McKeon says the subsidies disappeared over time and Roth Käse persevered by identifying and establishing their main customer base – the foodservice industry.

“In our early days we were struggling against some stiff competition,” Mckeon says. “We found the right combination between our product selling points and the needs of our targeted customers.”

The foodservice industry, which constitutes about 60 to 75 percent of Roth Käse’s customer base, appreciated the company’s quality, innovation and service levels, McKeon says. “Many of our customers require consistency in their recipe ingredients,” McKeon says. “Having a company that can deliver consistently the same texture, flavor and age on an ongoing basis is very attractive.”
Roth Käse has worked to achieve this consistency through a $5 million dollar, 13,000-square-foot expansion at its Monroe headquarters. This expansion included the addition of the Culinary Education and Affinage facility, which extends the cheese’s curing and refining area and gives a chance for chefs to taste and use the company’s cheeses in a professional kitchen environment.

Experienced Staff
McKeon says that Roth Käse maintains a strong relationship with its employees, a factor that results in dedicated, knowledgeable workers. More than 40 percent of the company’s work force has been employed for at least five years, with some employees staying on for as long as 15 years. “We like the fact that many of our employees – management, supervisors, key players in the company – have been around for a long time,” McKeon says. “We feel that turnover breaks the excellence chain for product quality and consistency of service.”

Maintaining this low turnover is especially important at the cheesemaker level, where workers’ physical and technical expertise are developed. “Our products [require] a lot of personal attention throughout the aging process,” he says.

Roth Käse’s signature cheese is the Grand Cru Gruyère, a product the company says it strived to make “as noble as the Swiss classic, but representative of the local territory.”
This defining cheese has been selected for many awards, including First Place in the 2000 World Cheese Championship and for a gold medal in the 2004 World Cheese Awards.