Redhead Creamery

Redhead Creamery is a farmstead, award-winning, artisan cheese plant located on a family-owned dairy farm in Central Minnesota. Alise Sjostrom, owner and founder (and natural redhead), grew up on Jer-Lindy Farms along with her three redheaded sisters. She always dreamed of taking over the farm and told her parents, Jerry and Linda Jennissen, that she wasn't going to milk cows. At 16, on a national 4-H trip to a farmstead cheese plant in Wisconsin, the idea for Redhead Creamery began.

At the University of Minnesota, Alise even created her own major in dairy production and food marketing. That's also where she met her future husband and fellow dairy farm kid, Lucas Sjostrom, who proposed in front of the beef barn on campus. After college, Alise and Lucas traveled the country visiting every farmstead creamery they could find and began making plans for one of their own. Alise earned her Artisan Cheesemaking License from the University of Vermont and has worked for some of the largest artisan cheese companies in the country. When they moved back to the Midwest, Crave Brothers in Wisconsin, the creamery she visited at 16 on that 4-H trip, created a marketing position just for her.

By 2012, more than a decade after she first announced her future cheese plans to her parents, Lucas and Alise started making plans to head back home to her family farm in Minnesota and start their family. Now the real work was about to begin!