It’s the talk of the town.When word spread through Ripley, and north up Highway 21 to Kincardine, and riffled across the breadth of Bruce County that the Pine River Cheese and Butter Co-Operative had made the hard decision to close after 134 years in business, well, you can imagine the shock. Cottagers and townsfolk stampeded for the store and on Wednesday of this week it was like…What was it like? Here’s Ulrike Prehn, the co-op’s chief executive: “It’s Cheesemageddon in our store.”Wednesday is Super Squeaky Cheese Curd Day, so the shop is commonly caught up in a midweek bustle. (Cheddar with caramelized onion is the most popular of the flavoured cheese curds.) Add to that the shattering news that the co-op is slated for closure and it’s no wonder the cheese is flying off the shelves. “We keep telling people we’re still here,” Prehn says. “The store will be open through Christmas.” But the 16-farmer-owned co-op will stop accepting milk at the end of this month, production will grind to a halt, and 25 people will be out of work. (“I think that doesn’t include me, so you can make it 26,” Prehn later adds.)There are families, generation after generation, who have known no other cheese than Pine River. Premium cheese, made locally, from the milk of local dairy herds. Back in the day — this is one occasion when “back in the day” is a serviceable phrase — dads took daughters to the old Pine River building on 6th concession where customers cut their own cheese from the block. Thirty-five cents a pound. These relationships are lifelong.A ravaging fire in the autumn of 1981 took out the entire operation at its first location on the banks of the Pine River. And another in 2010 at a new facility at a new location was structurally devastating yet left millions of dollars worth of cheese inventory, in cold storage at the far side of the plant, largely untou ...
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