WQOW TV: Eau Claire, WI NEWS18 News, Weather, and SportsChampion Cheese
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Jim Falls (WQOW) -- Jim Falls can now call itself home to a national champion. Last week the AMPI cheese plant not only won the award for best American style pepper cheese in the country, the company also took 2nd and 3rd place for its other pepper flavored cheeses.
Richard "Whitie" Wold says winning a 1st place award in the US Championship Cheese contest is like winning the super bowl of cheese making.
Whitie, a Cheese Maker at AMPI says, "We took all three with cheddar chipotle was the first one. The second was a habanero jalapeno, the third was just jalapeno."
John Breene, Division Manager for AMPI says, "For us locally, it's a huge deal. For our company as a whole its bragging rights in the United States for the next year."
Breene says winning the championship means more than just bragging rights. More than two million pounds of milk is processed by AMPI's Jim Falls plant each day and Breene says it's their customers who will reap the rewards of AMPI's championship.
Breene says, "For us personally to make a lot of hay with that, we probably won't. But for a lot of our customers that we sell cheese to, they will be able to sell more product to some of their customers."
That's obviously good news for western Wisconsin considering how much the state's specialty cheese market has grown in recent years.
Breene says, "Our pepper jack business has grown by 50 percent in the last two years."
While neither John or Whitie wouldn't divulge the recipe for their championship chipotle cheddar. They did reveal the inspiration.
Whitie says, "It comes from our customers asking if we'd be willing to try something like this. So we experimented with it. And they liked what we did, so we started making it."
AMPI isn't the only local company to win a national championship at last week's contest. LaGrander's Hillside Dairy in Stanley won the championship for the best colby in the country. Grassland Dairy in Greenwood won 1st place in both butter categories.
