Area viewers of ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir were seeing familiar faces and families last Wednesday when the final “Made in America” segment spotlighted Sheboygan County’s own Sargento Cheese Company. The story, geared to mesh with the “worker” theme of the Labor Day Weekend, also highlighted the family factor found threading throughout the company’s path from Leonard Gentine’s founding of the Plymouth Cheese Counter back in the 1940’s through to the present day, with the 70-year old company run by the 3rd Generation of the Gentine family. Whole families who’ve worked for Sargento were also featured, while the segment also highlighted the Lyn-Vale farm that, within 10 miles of the factory, is one of some 40 generational family-run farms in the region that supply the ingredients for making the signature product of Wisconsin’s dairy industry – and which Americans were using to make cheeseburgers on the grill, and probably snitching from the bag on the side during their Labor Day picnics.
Though the Sargento story is long – and familiar – to area residents, it was a long time coming to national recognition, just like the ABC story itself, whose seed was planted around a year ago by Sargento Director of Corporate Relations, Portia Young.
“I’ll start at the very beginning, which really was last fall…the fall of 2023. I knew that we were having a big milestone anniversary coming…2023 was our 70th year of business. And so I was like ‘OK, our anniversary that just might be the hook to, just kind of be able to tell that story about how we’re family-owned.’ You know, getting that national coverage is really difficult to do, especially in today’s media landscape. But we said, ‘You know what, 70 years for a family-owned business in a category like cheese, or just in the grocery in general, and consumer packaged goods, it’s a pretty darned good story to tell.’ So, we didn’t think, you know, ‘We’ll shoot for the stars and see will we land on the moon.’ But we actually ended up being on the sun! But it did take a year.”
After shopping the story around, ABC agreed that it’s a perfect family-oriented success story for Labor Day, and once it aired, the reaction to the story was immediate and impossible to miss.
“It has just really blown up across the Sargento family. Our employees are talking about it, our community is talking about it, I know Louie (Gentine) is getting lots of praise out in the community from folks who have seen the segment, and we were able to measure that across digital, broadcast, social, it’s been close to 100 million impressions. So we’re just super, super excited to be featured nationally.”
Many of the big-business details such as the $1.8 billion in annual Sargento sales that contribute to Sheboygan County’s economy, weren’t included in ABC’s feature, but Young was quick to remind us of the impressive impact that Sargento has had on the way the US buys cheese.
“If you think about it, we were the first to put natural cheese inside of a re-sealable package; we were the first to shred cheese, put it in a package; slice cheese, put it in a package; first to vacuum-pack cheese, put it in a package, so that really enabled, I think, the American consumer to be able to eat more cheese. Back in the 1950s, you had to go for, you know with a deli product, you had to behind the glass on the counter, you couldn’t just grab it off the shelf. And then our founder, Leonard Gentine, also thought up the peg-bar merchandising system to merchandise cheese that way in the grocery store, which still is the way it is merchandised today. So, being able to make it easier for the consumer to make that choice, and then offer the variety of cheese that we have, that did change America, and it’s just something that a lot of Americans take for granted, that, ‘Oh, there’s always been shredded, package cheese.’ No, there hasn’t, and there wasn’t, until there was Sargento.”
But even if those details remain unknown to the ABC audience, at least now much of the nation is wise to the fact that Plymouth is the Cheese Capitol of the World, and two big reasons for that are the Gentine family and Sargento Cheese.
By the way, the Plymouth Cheese Counter and Dairy Heritage Center on Mill Street in Plymouth now serves as both a lunch counter and cheese museum. And if you missed the feature, you can find ABC’s “Made in America” segment on Sargento linked on WHBL’s Facebook Page.
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