Our Story

Our story begins when Street Cheese was born on September 30, 2020.

We had been talking about starting our own business since we began working together in 2015. After years of working at grocery store cheese counters and watching companies build big, beautiful cheese counters in their new stores–and then refuse to properly train staff or offer enough hours for them to maintain the product, we realized nobody was going to let us do things “the right way” unless we did it ourselves. We also realized that, if we waited until we had “enough money to start a business,” we would never get there.

So it all began in late 2020, with each of us pitching in $250 and figuring out how to start a business. Our first orders were custom cheese platters and grazing tables during the holiday season, as well as a few home cheese deliveries.

In 2021, we built more platters and grazing tables, and started working out of The Crate at Discover Burien, a micro-business incubator with a licensed and inspected commissary kitchen. In July, we were invited for our first public event: a cheese and wine pairing at Refuel Café in Renton. At the same time, Discover Burien’s executive director encouraged us to reach out to a new brewery, Logan Brewing Company, to set up a pop-up. They agreed to have us come sell cheese plates to their customers at the end of July. It was a success, so we returned in August.

The cheese plate pop-up became a regular event, first at Logan and then at Future Primitive Brewing in White Center and Bickersons Brewhouse in Renton. We soon added charcuterie plates to the menu, Raclette during the cold months, and grilled Halloumi for summer.

In 2022, the pop-up circuit picked up so much that we were doing two or three events a week at a variety of breweries, in addition to working full-time at our day jobs. It was a lot of fun, but we also got really burned out. By the end of 2022, our customers were asking more frequently how they could find us on a regular. Right around the same time, folks began returning to a semblance of pre-COVID normalcy—ordering from their neighborhood restaurants and bringing food to the breweries—so pop-ups began to die down.

In 2023, we stopped doing pop-ups and focused on scheduling cheese classes and tastings with our brewery and restaurant partners. We also started looking for a brick-and-mortar location so that we could finally serve our customers on a more regular and accessible basis.

We continue to put on pairing classes and tastings with other businesses, and we host regular pop-up shops from the front window of Discover Burien. We are currently hunting for this little cheese shop’s permanent home. We will always take Street Cheese on the road for mobile events, but we do need a place to park our cheese. Our goal is to open a store by the end of 2024. If you’d like to help us accomplish that, there are a few things you can do: buy cheese from us, hire us to build a platter or grazing table, come to our events, tell your friends, or, if you are able, donate a little money to help push us across the finish line. Refrigeration is expensive, y’all!