"Where did you get a piece of cheese that big?"

The question came from an onlooker who was watching Sarah Kaufmann, "The Cheese Lady" (http://www.sarahcheeselady.com), carve a Bucky Badger from a huge piece of cheese at the grand opening of a Hy-Vee supermarket in Madison last weekend.

"It came from Henning's Cheese at Kiel in Manitowoc County and weighs 1,014 pounds," Kaufmann says. "That's my home county and Henning's is the only cheese factory in Wisconsin that makes mammoth cheeses this big" -- 30 inches high and 30 inches wide.

Really?

It seems so, at least on a regular basis, according to Kerry Henning, master cheesemaker at Henning's Cheese Factory, located on a rural road a few miles northeast of Kiel.

"A cheese weighing 75 pounds or more is considered a mammoth," Henning explains. "We regularly make cheeses from 100 to 2,000 pounds and have made many 12,000-pound mammoths."

Most of these big cheeses are used for store openings and celebrations as attractions to draw people, he said. They supply the cheeses for carvings done by Kaufmann (a former creative director for the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board) across the country.

"It's sort of a niche market for us," Henning says. "We're a small, family operation and can't compete head on with the 'big boys,' so we have to be different and good."

Not a bad formula for success if one considers that the Henning family has been making cheese for 95 years and now has its fourth generation involved in cheesemaking.

Otto and Norma were the first of the Hennings to make cheese in a simple factory a quarter mile down the road from the current facility.

In 1963 son Everett and his wife, Jellane, took over the business, and in the early 1980s their daughter Kay and sons Kerry and Kert came into the company. Now a fourth generation, Kay's daughter Mindy and Kert's daughter Rebekah, are full-time in the family operation.

How does a cheese factory stay in business for so long?

Certainly not because cheesemaking is easy or automatically profitable.

It was common at first. When granddad Otto began making cheese in 1914, it was during the time Wisconsin was moving from wheat to cows as its main farming enterprise. Cheese factories were sprouting up on every corner of rural Wisconsin and there were more than 2,500 factories statewide -- 120 of them in Manitowoc County -- when the Hennings began making cheese.

But when Everett Henning took over in the early 1960s, the number of cheese factories had shrunk to about 500. When Kay, Kerry and Kert joined the operation in the early 1980s as a cheesemaker and marketer, respectively, the number had dropped to 300. Today there are only about 125 cheese factories in the state.

Like dairy farming, cheesemaking has forever been a sort of "survival of the fittest." Ambition, innovation and smart management are reasons for success and the Hennings have it figured out.

Kerry Henning explains how his dad, Everett, was always progressive, which included moving from cans to bulk milk hauling, building a new factory in the late 1960s and adding the latest in pasteurization and quality control technology.

The late 1980s were a time of high inflation and tough times for Wisconsin dairy farms and cheese factories, Kerry remembers. For their operation in particular, selling only 12 pound-midgets to a single buyer was a problem; they wanted to be able to set their own prices.

Kerry, the cheesemaker with an accounting degree from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, began looking at new products, among them mammoth cheeses that once were popular but had declined to the point where no one was making them. "We saw mammoths as a niche," he says. "And while we were maybe the last to get in, we are now the last one in. Now they are a big attraction nationally."

Kert Henning, a business management graduate, took on the marketing challenge by visiting nearly every store in eastern Wisconsin to establish and increase sales. His daughter Rebekah has now assumed the Wisconsin sales area and Kert is working with national customers.

Their sister Kay Schmitz is the one responsible for accounting and customer service (you'll get her when you call to order cheese) and has now been joined by her daughter Mindy Ausloos in that area of operations.

The company has expanded over the years and you can now buy many kinds of cheese from Henning's: mild to aged cheddar, cinnamon apple pie, creamy caramel, mango fire, Mediterranean with kalamata olive and peppercorn among them. Then there is mozzarella, farmers and farmers pepper, and four kinds of string cheese and more. And of course gift boxes that go worldwide. (Call 920-894-3032 or go to www.henningscheese.com.)

So how exactly does a small, 25-employee company compete with huge operations that have thousands of workers and big factories?

"We don't compete with them," Kerry and Kert agree. "We set ourselves apart. We offer a wide variety of cheeses and are constantly developing new ones. Our employees are versatile and can make different great cheeses every day."

The point of the Hennings' story is that you don't have to be big to be a successful cheese factory but you have to be good -- very, very good.

Everett Henning is still an integral part of the family corporation but defers attention and much responsibility to his children. Meanwhile, Kay, Kerry and Kert are proud of their cheese and take great pride in hosting visitors from area school classes to vacationers from across the country who drop in.

"I think Dad always wanted something like we have now," Kerry says. We're honored that people will take time to visit us, see our factory, view our new cheesemaking museum and buy our cheese."

Indeed, 95 years is a long time for any business to exist, but the Henning family of Kiel are still going strong (and stronger) making and marketing cheese. It's all about family working together in harmony and doing their very best at what they do.

And that's a pretty good approach to life!

John F. Oncken is owner of Oncken Communications, a Madison based agricultural information and consulting company. He can be reached at 222-0624 or via e-mail at jfodairy@chorus.net.

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