I hate bearing bad news, but Central Coast Creamery has ceased production. This acclaimed California enterprise, launched in 2007, pulled the plug late last year, selling its creamery and everything in it to a paneer manufacturer. If you loved Central Coast cheeses as much as I did, this development is beyond discouraging. So long to Dream Weaver (above right), Holey Cow, Faultline, Seascape, Ewereka (above center) and Ewenique, not to mention the award-winning aged sheep cheeses from its sister brand, Shooting Star Creamery. I have long viewed proprietor Reggie Jones as having both cheesemaking prowess and good business sense. Something doesn’t smell right in artisan cheese land if even Jones can’t see a way forward.

“Costs keep going up but the market can’t bear any more price increases,” says Jones. “The margins kept shrinking and the workload didn’t go down, I can tell you that.”

Jones, a former culture salesman, seemed to be dialed in to consumer preferences right from the start. His earliest creations—many of them Gouda- or Cheddar-style wheels with a creamy texture and sweet flavor profile—sold briskly and won numerous American Cheese Society awards. Dream Weaver, a supple washed-rind goat’s milk cheese, filled a wide-open niche. A few years ago, Jones and his youngest daughter, Avery, launched Shooting Star Creamery to make sheep cheese. Avery, then 15, won a blue ribbon in her first ACS competition—for Aries, a sheep wheel that went on to place third overall. Dad and daughter followed that success with Shooting Star Leo, a superb soft-ripened sheep cheese (above left) and Capricorn, a promising goat blue developed when the creamery’s sheep milk supply dried up.

“We were the last one making aged sheep and goat cheeses in California,” says Jones, whose milk suppliers kept folding no matter how much he paid them. “We’ve gone through five producers of sheep milk in six years.” Last July, Shooting Star’s sheep milk source announced that 2025 was its final season. Jones wasn’t sure he had the energy to keep scrounging for milk.

Central Coast wasn’t tiny; it was a medium-sized artisan producer. But it was trapped in a difficult middle spot, with more production capacity than independent shops alone could handle yet not enough to satisfy chain grocery stores.

“You get to a certain level, and you can’t get to the next level,” says Jones. “Look at grocery stores. It’s all the same cheeses. It’s not interesting at all. These grocery chains are catering to only the large producers that can give them big deals. There’s no spot for smaller producers in the grocery aisle.”

Nor did he want to pre-cut and vacuum-seal his cheese in precise-weight packages. “After Covid, that’s what all the stores wanted,” says Jones. “It’s not the same cheese as when it’s fresh cut off a wheel. Plus, all the push for flavors in cheese. That’s not what we want to make.”

Central Coast Creamery blue — Shooting Star Creamery Capricorn

Jones’s comments reinforce what I’m seeing in chain grocery stores in Northern California, where there is surely one of the most eager cheese audiences in the nation. The selection is banal and always the same. Some small chains like Central Market in Texas aim a lot higher with their cheese departments, and I don’t understand why their sophisticated approach can’t be scalable and profitable.

Jones did not sell his brands or his recipes, and he will continue to operate two Central Coast Creamery deli and cheese shops in the Paso Robles area. One of the sites has a small production facility, so we may not have seen the last creations from Reggie Jones yet.

Apart from the challenges of dwindling milk supply and rising costs, Jones faced another dilemma: no family succession plan. Avery is in graduate school in Nebraska, studying for a doctorate in paleoecology. One of her older sisters is a lawyer in San Francisco and the other is a financial adviser in Manhattan. What slackers.

“No one’s there to take on the business,” says Jones, a bit ruefully. “And I get it. I want my strong daughters to forge their own paths and help change the world.”