Gossner Foods: The Swiss Immigrant Who Turned Cache Valley Into Utah’s Cheese Country

If you’ve had a Swiss cheese sandwich in America, there’s a real chance the cheese came from Logan, Utah. And if you’ve driven through Cache Valley and stopped for a bag of squeaky cheese curds, you already know where.

Gossner Foods is one of Utah’s great family business stories. It starts on a small farm in Switzerland, takes a detour through Wisconsin and a devastating fire, and ends up in a valley that reminded one young cheesemaker of home.

The eighth of nine children

Edwin “Ed” Gossner grew up on a farm near Waldkirch in eastern Switzerland, the eighth of nine children. The family farm was going to his oldest brother, so in 1930 Ed left for America to join another brother who was making cheese in Wisconsin. He arrived with very little money and no English.

Within a few years he was running his own cheese factory near Shullsburg, Wisconsin. Then, in 1937, a fire destroyed both the plant and his home. Ed started over, first in California, and in 1941 he settled on Cache Valley, a place of green fields and mountain views he called “The Little Switzerland of the Rockies.”

From a sugar plant to Swiss cheese

A local cooperative gave Ed $5,000 to turn an old sugar plant into a Swiss cheese factory. He ran it for 24 years and helped turn Cache Valley’s dairy farms into a Swiss cheese powerhouse. Then, in his late fifties, he struck out on his own. Gossner Foods was incorporated in 1966 on 40 acres at the western edge of Logan, and its first product was massive 275-pound blocks of Swiss cheese.

Looking back on his journey, Ed once said that America had given him everything he’d hoped to have, beyond his fondest dreams.

Milk that lasts a year

In 1982, Gossner added a fluid milk plant using aseptic processing, which lets milk keep at room temperature for up to a year in sterile cartons, with no preservatives. The company says it’s the oldest family-owned aseptic milk operation in the country. That shelf-stable milk now ends up in school lunches and has been shipped to U.S. troops around the world.

Ed’s daughter, Dolores Gossner Wheeler, led the company for more than three decades, adding Swiss cheese plants in California and Idaho and expanding the milk operation. After her death in 2018, Ed’s great-granddaughter, Kristan Gibbs Earl, became president and CEO, the fourth generation of the family to run Gossner.

Today the company buys about 3 million pounds of milk a day and makes about 20 percent of all the Swiss cheese in the United States, according to Gossner. That milk comes from family dairy farms across Utah and Idaho.

The squeak heard round Cache Valley

For locals and road-trippers, the best part of Gossner is the retail store next to the cheese plant. It’s styled like a little Alpine shop, and it’s where you’ll find the famous fresh cheese curds, the kind that squeak against your teeth when they’re really fresh. Alongside the curds you’ll find Swiss, Muenster, cheddar, Havarti with dill, smoked curds, ice cream, and cartons of flavored shelf-stable milk.

How to do Gossner right

• Buy the curds. Eat a few in the parking lot while they still squeak. Everyone does.
• Go on a Friday. Visitors report more curd varieties at the end of the week.
• Grab a carton of flavored milk. Chocolate is the classic. Adventurous types try the seasonal flavors.
• Make it a Cache Valley day. Pair your cheese run with Logan’s other local food stops and a drive up Logan Canyon.

Ed Gossner came looking for a place that felt like the Swiss farm he left behind. He found it in Cache Valley, and nearly a century later his family is still making cheese there, one squeaky curd at a time.

Explore more Cache Valley stories. And if you run a local business with a story worth telling, apply to be featured. It’s always free.

This spotlight draws on Gossner Foods’ company history, the Salt Lake Tribune, Visit Utah and Utah.com. Photos are illustrative and were not taken at Gossner. Top photo: Wisconsin Denizen, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.