Owner Profiles

	To Brie or Not to Brie
	Janice Beaton by Scott Messenger June 2009 Janice Beaton won’t say it outright, but visit her cheese boutiques or Farm, the new restaurant she co-owns, and you’ll sense that she sees something sacred in a washed-rind Epoisses from Burgundy or a handmade Stilton from Nottinghamshire. But it’s that kind of reverence that earned the Calgarian a place in the Guilde des Fromagers and Confrerie de Saint-Uguzon. For 40 years, the Dijon, France-based organizations have lauded the efforts of the makers, vendors and aficionados of fine cheeses around the world. This spring, a visit to Vancouver marked just the second time the groups have come to bestow honours in Canada. Beaton was there as the only Albertan inductee, recognized for a decade of devotion that has given doubters of supermarket dairy departments renewed faith in the possibility of a better cheddar. Where did your interest in cheese begin? My most vivid childhood memory is of being with my grandmother when she was making cheese on a farm in Cape Breton where I grew up. I was probably less than five…. We’d load the cheese curds into this big [press] and put stones on top of it and I’d go with her every week to check it and turn it. That was a seminal moment in my cheese life. How do you compete with supermarkets? Cheese for a lot of food stores is a loss leader. We don’t have that luxury – cheese is 90% of what we sell. The other piece is we get the best products we can find. [But also] our focus is on understanding the product and being able to educate our customers, take away the intimidation factor that can exist whether you’re a cheese shop, a wine store, any specialty store. That ability to make it comfortable is an important part of what we do. Besides competition what are the biggest challenges you’ve faced? There’s always change and being able to roll with change is hugely important for any entrepreneur. And to make good decisions. We made a big decision last year to move one of our shops into the same building as Caffe Beano, the coffee shop [I co-own] and also to open Farm there, so it’s a contiguous space. It was not an inexpensive project. Why open a restaurant rather than another shop? There’s more to do to make people aware of our presence. We looked at the idea of opening Farm as an extension of the shops. There’s more substance to the menu than just cheese and charcuterie boards, but it’s almost like it’s a tasting room for the cheese shops. With the downturn, I’m tempted to think of fine cheese as a luxury item. There’s part of me that wants to say, ‘Are you crazy? You need cheese in your diet every day!’ In as much as we are in this downturn, people’s knowledge of good food has expanded and people think more about the products they buy. Lots of people really consider where they buy their food and they [want to] support small business. I think those things stand us in good stead right now. Will you grow further in the near future? I feel right now that I’ve got my hands full. We’re doing the best we can to solidify what is still a relatively new business – the shop and the restaurant together. I think that’s where our attention and energy need to lie.

Last Updated: Thursday, October 07, 2010