Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Heather Donaldson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Heather, thanks for joining us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

At Mad Cheese, our mission is to help more people eat more plants, more often. A few months before Covid, my husband and I decided that we wanted to do more to help the environment. After researching, we decided that the most impactful thing we could do as individuals would be to adopt a plant-based diet. As a self-proclaimed foodie who loves all food, I wasn’t sure it would be sustainable for me. We agreed that we would try it for one week. We had so much fun coming up with new ways of preparing plant-based food that we kept doing it and one week stretched into two months. We started feeling better, too. We really missed cheese, though, and weren’t thrilled with the commercial options available. I began experimenting with making plant-based cheeses at home, which eventually led us to start Mad Cheese.

Heather, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

In 2019, my husband and I decided to try a vegan diet.. We wanted to do more to help the environment and were hopeful that we would enjoy the food enough to make it our permanent way of eating.

Before going vegan, we both had a love for artisan cheeses and charcuterie. I wasn’t thrilled with the commercial vegan options available, so began researching how to create and age plant-based cheeses and meats at home. When the pandemic hit, we both ended up at home with no outside work. (My husband works in the film industry and we were living in Los Angeles). This gave me plenty of time to work on perfecting my recipes.

The following summer, we traveled back to Cincinnati (we both grew up here) to visit my in-laws. We realized that they could use some extra support, and since there still wasn’t work happening in LA, we bought a house here in Madisonville (where my husband was raised and his parents still live) and made the cross-country move. All fall we renovated our 1889 farmhouse and I kept working on my cheeses.

As I perfected recipes, I started giving samples to friends and family to try. They liked them so much that they shared them with their friends and family. I started getting requests from people I had never even met. People wanted to be able to buy them, and Mad Cheese was born.

We started Mad Cheese with zero capital, one email address, a part-time kitchen space in a church basement and five products. Less than three years later, we have a fully equipped commercial kitchen, a new storefront and more than twenty-five products. We are on the menu at several local restaurants, local retailers carry our products and we ship nationwide.

We spend hours perfecting our recipes so that our products taste and act like their dairy and meat counterparts. We hear all the time from customers that they love the results. Everything is made in-house, by hand, in small batches.

Our hope is that everyone will love our products whether they are vegan, dairy-free or just sometimes plant-based. The more we can eat plant- based food, the healthier we – and our planet – will be!

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We manufacture everything on-site, in our commercial kitchen in the back of our brick-and-mortar shop. When we started, we knew absolutely nothing about the food manufacturing process/industry. We worked with the Ohio Department of Agriculture for several months leading up to our launch to determine safe manufacturing processes and protocol. We found a great friend in another local business owner who manufactures their own food products, and he tirelessly answered our many questions and offered advice.

We have learned so much along this journey. For example, our products are fairly sensitive, so if one ingredient changes (sometimes even if we just change the brand we buy from), it can change our recipe significantly, resulting in a product that is not consistent. Another thing we have learned is that scaling a recipe up is not as simple as multiplying the ingredients by a certain amount. There are so many other factors that come into play.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

We launched Mad Cheese with absolutely zero capital. We used our retirement for the first several months to buy ingredients, labels, packaging, etc. I created the website, did all of the product photography, social media posting, etc. I was lucky to find a church that wasn’t using their kitchen due to Covid, and was able to use the kitchen there for limited hours each week in exchange for working in their office one day a week and cleaning the bathrooms. After the first year, I applied for a grant with Main Street Ventures. I was so thrilled to receive the full grant amount, which allowed us to move to a space dedicated just to Mad Cheese and equip that space with commercial equipment.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.madcheese.com
• Instagram: madcheesecincy
• Facebook: madcheesecincy
• Yelp: Mad Cheese
• Other: Tiktok: madcheesecincy