Today we’d like to introduce you to Andrea Cudin.
Hi Andrea, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
There is something about me I did not know as long as I was living in that north-east corner of Italy where I was born and grew up: cheese. I like cheese, I eat cheese, I need cheese. But not just any cheese. Rather, the cheese from Friuli, my little corner of Italy. All of this came to realization when I moved to Texas, the place my wife is from. And, somehow, I managed to turn a constraint into an advantage. First I started making my own cheese at home in Victoria, Texas. And then, when the opportunity arose, I opened a small, artisan creamery inside a dairy farm in Moulton, Texas.
July 2026 we celebrate 10 years in business: the best part of it, beside the cheese of course, it has been all the people met along the way.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
When starting a business there always are expectations of a quick profitability. Or at least we had them. Well, that turned out to be true for us, except it wasn’t quick. The lack of that little adjective has had profound implications. At first in fact there seemed not to be a customer base wide enough to support a creamery making cheeses people here tend not to be too familiar with. And the slow progression of sales did put pressure on our financial stability. We had times when we questioned if it made sense to keep going. Our strength, if we had one, has been resilience for the first couple of years, working hard while taking little to no salary. And making a lot of mozzarella!
As you know, we’re big fans of Lira Rossa Artisan Cheese. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
We are an Italian small artisan creamery, like you can find in almost every village in Italy, only we are based out of a fourth generation family farm in Moulton, called Four E Dairy. The family owning the farm is of czech heritage,like most of the people in the area, and they milk about 400 jersey cows and sell raw milk out of their farm store and through delivery or membership services all the way up to San Antonio, Austin and Houston. We met by chance, while we were looking for a reliable source of milk. They built us a space in their dairy and rented it to us. That has created a somehow hybrid situation, where we are a farmstead creamery without owning a farm. And for that we do not need to transport milk, and we work side by side with farmers and their animals, and that way we constantly have a direct knowledge of the cows providing us with the milk we use for making our cheese. Recently we also started making sheep milk cheese thanks to a farm located near Bastrop, called Stregare.
We now make a wide variety of Italian cheeses, from Mozzarella and Ricotta to Blue Cheese and Asiago. Our main staple is Latteria, a raw milk cheese alpine style typical from the region of Italy I come from. We have won several national prizes with our cheese, but in the end, who’s counting? 🙂
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
We are a risk adverse company, but even this attitude does not protect us from the risk inherent in doing business. The biggest bet we took was locating the creamery inside of the dairy. In fact, we did not sign any contract, and our agreement with the farmers has been done in the very texan way: a handshake. Ten years later that handshake has not been shaken by any of the problems that naturally arose. But if I look back, I realize that the risk was great in placing a large part of our money into a place we had no rights on. I must add that the farmers took a comparable bet by taking out a loan to pay for a building to rent us without any assurance we were going to stick to our commitment.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lirarossa.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lira_rossa/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lirarossacheese/
