Mill Grove Dairy’s Pieter and Nicky Tromp on making their own cheese
This couple went from working in nursing and horticulture to starting their own cheese business. This is why.
THE DUTCH really like their cheese — they eat about 22kg of it each per year.
So it is not surprising to hear Pieter Tromp say that gouda, a cheese that takes its name from a Dutch city, “is kind of in my veins”.
Dutchman Pieter and his wife, Nicky, started making cheese under their brand, Mill Grove Dairy, two years ago. They now have two shops, in Wesburn and Warburton, in the Yarra Valley.
Their speciality is gouda — as well as a plain variety, they also make flavoured goudas, including cracked pepper, fenugreek and cumin.
They also make feta and have recently started making triple cream brie, which will be available from next Friday.
It all started because Pieter was desperate for a little taste of home.
When Australian-born nurse Nicky met Pieter, he was working in horticulture with roses. They eventually married, and Pieter decided to stay in Australia. “I felt a little bit guilty about that because he had to leave his family and friends. And so I said to him, do you miss Holland? And he was like, no, I don’t really miss anything except for the cheese,” Nicky says.
“Back then I was very naive about how good cheese was in Holland because I only knew what I had grown up with and that was the Coon and Kraft cheddar, and I was really
surprised at that response and I said ‘What’s wrong with our cheese? Our cheese is good’.
“And from that moment on it was his mission to educate me about cheese … and I’ve never looked back.”
When the couple travelled in Holland, they visited many cheese shops and Nicky says she was “converted immediately”. Back at home, they started going to cheesemaking courses in Lilydale, which translated into a hobby. Eventually making cheese at home grew into a business plan.
“We bought this house where we are now in Mill Grove with the vision of eventually having a cheese business. We needed obviously some place to build a cheese factory, so we found this house, and there was a big shed in the backyard, but it was just an empty shed – it had no power, no water.”
They say it took about four years — and plenty of work to meet food safety and council standards — to achieve their cheese factory dream within the roughly 56sqm shed.
Their families and friends — with the exception of Nicky’s brother — on both sides of the world were convinced the plan would come to bust.
“My mum and dad were very worried because we were spending so much money on it … they were convinced we were going to fail, absolutely convinced … now, she’s actually come to me and said ‘I was wrong’,” Nicky says.
Pieter and Nicky started trading as Mill Grove Dairy in 2018, but even though they were off the ground, the going was still tough. A year ago, they made a pact to quit if nothing had changed in 12 months.
They focused increasingly on their own retail opportunities, rather than rely on wholesale and selling to wineries. Their fromagerie in Wesburn, The Mill House, was opened mid last year. Nicky says they “very scary times because it was a huge jump (for the business)”. Here they sell their cheese, complemented by another 40 varieties they have sourced elsewhere. They also partnered with Wild Fire Wines to open Taste Yarra Valley in Warburton earlier this year, which is a combination of wine bar, cellar door and dairy shop.
It opened in early March – just weeks before the full impact of coronavirus restrictions hit.
Around the same time, Nicky left nursing to focus on the business. As they stopped making cheese and closed both shops due to coronavirus, the family did discuss Nicky going back, but decided it was not worth the risk.
The couple would normally make two batches of cheese per week, using 300L of milk at a time, sourced from Gippsland Jersey. They hit pause when the lockdowns hit.
“A few weeks ago we started production again — once a week. We thought we would wait until the COVID eases a bit and then we would go back to twice a week,” Pieter says. Nicky adds they don’t want to be making too much cheese as they are not sure what the future holds, and demand is higher for younger cheese.
The shop is open again, three days a week — Friday to Sunday — instead of five. Nicky says they are busy on those days, but opening on other weekdays was not worth it. “We rely on the tourists. If there’s no tourists, there’s no shop,” she says. “We’re pretty careful in the shop. We only allow three at a time, and we spray the door handles and everything regularly, and supply hand sanitiser.”
So while there are new challenges being presented, Pieter and Nicky are proud of the cheese they are producing.
And while Pieter may have once despaired about the cheese available in his new country, he says he has since learnt more about some of his fellow Victorian producers: “There is a lot of good cheese here in Australia, you just have to find it.”
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