Memorial by Brian Bailey, Feb 2025
Tony Kutter passed away on January 15th, 2025. He was 91 years old. Beside being a good husband, father and friend, he was entwined in cheese making and in the New York dairy industry for his entire life.
He was born in Cowlesville, NY at home on March 4th, 1933. His father and mother (Leo and Flora Kutter) had immigrated to the United States from Bavaria shortly after World War I. Leo had served in the German army and had been a POW in France. Ironically, Leo escaped from a prison camp in France and fled through an icy stream in the dead of winter the night before the Armistice was signed ending the war.
Tony’s father had trained as a cheese maker in Bavaria and after coming to the United States, and operated a cheese plant just outside of Cowlesville, NY. They made Swiss Cheese and Limburger in the factory on one side of Schoelkopf road and then aged them in the basement of his home on the opposite side of the road. Tony and his older brother, Richard were literally raised on cheese.
When the United States entered World War II, the war effort took in most of the local milk supply so many cheese plants had to close. Leo shut his factory down and helped the factories in the area that could still operate.
In 1947, Leo purchased land on route 5 in Pembroke, NY and built a new factory. He began making Swiss cheese and Limburger which he sold locally and through a small factory store in the plant. Tony and his brother worked in the factory after school and on weekends. One of the factories that Leo had helped during the war was Cuba cheese (Owned by I. van Zwanenberg and Edwin Moses) and at Leo’s request, Edwin taught Leo how to make cheddar cheese as many of Leo’s customers had been asking for it.
Leo passed away in the early 1960’s and his two sons took over and continued to build the business. Richard gravitated more toward the business side and administration and Tony’s main interest was cheese making and manufacturing and this arrangement led to a productive team and continued growth.
Sour cream based dairy dips were a relatively new product and Kutter’s tried selling them in their factory store but the shelf life, in the early days, was poor. When Tony complained to the manufacturer about it, they quipped “Well, you own your own plant, why don’t you make your own”. Tony thought about the sarcastic answer he’d been given and decided to, indeed, create his own dips. In those days, Heluva Good Cheese Company bought some products from Kutter’s and the owner stopped by one day and asked if they had anything new he could sell. Tony showed him the dip he had been working on and Heluva Good’s sour cream- based dip business was born. Kutter’s made all of Heluva Goods dips for many years.
The brothers were hard working and innovative. They built and tested a system by which they would make snow in the winter using snow guns, such as ski resorts use, to make a huge mound of snow that they captured in a covered basin and then the snow melt would provide essentially free refrigeration to the plant through July.
The demand for cheese curd began to grow and Tony refined their cheddaring process to give the best results for cheese curd and Kutter’s became the largest maker and supplier of cheese curds in the northeast for many years.
As time went on Tony began to experiment with making pasteurized process cheese and invented horseradish cheddar cheese. It was the first of it’s kind and later became the nucleus for the formation of Yancey’s Fancy, Inc. cheese company.
In 1998, Yancey’s Fancy purchased the factory business from the Kutters and Tony retired. In his retirement, Tony volunteered to help with business development in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. In all, he made 31 trips to Russia and Ukraine to help them build and improve their cheese making efforts. He taught and trained them in every aspect of the process of making cheese and other dairy products. He managed to learn to speak Russian and he wrote and published a book entitled “Cheese in the time of Glasnost and Perestroika” (available on Amazon)
Tony remained interested in cheese his entire life. He studied what others were doing and he studied the various varieties of cheese. In his closing years, when his mobility became very limited, he turned to making cheese in his kitchen at home. In fact, he was making Gorgonzola cheese in his kitchen two weeks before his passing.
