Success Stories
A Social Innovation Success Story
Monforte Dairy
Ruth Klahsen, owner/lead cheesemaker
Monforte Dairy Company
What happens when social innovation meets artisan cheese? You get a company like Monforte Dairy – a Stratford-based producer with a different approach to doing business.
In 2009 Monforte Dairy founder Ruth Klahsen launched Monforte Renaissance, a program that lets customers buy subscriptions to the artisan cheese Monforte produces.
Customers pay in advance; then they choose either to have gift baskets delivered to them, or to receive vouchers they can redeem for products at markets and retailers.
This approach represents a new model for growing and distributing food. It’s called Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) and it brings farmers and consumers closer together.
Klahsen realized she could do things differently one day a few years ago when she was buying some chickens. Her fellow farmer asked her to pay up front in order to cover his farming costs.
At Monforte Dairy, CSA has brought peace of mind to Klahsen: her subscriptions ensure her production and distribution costs are covered. And it’s enabled her to open a new facility.
As for customers, they enjoy a tremendously high quality product, produced on a human scale and with sustainability and animal welfare given priority. They also experience greater involvement in the business – like last April, for example, when Monforte threw a party to thank its subscribers.
Klahsen is passionate about seeing the CSA model spread. “We want to give everyone the opportunity to be an agent of change,” she says, “to have a voice in changing the politics of how quality food is produced, distributed, marketed and sold in Ontario.”
Great ideas like the CSA model are creating both successful and socially responsible business that everyone can count on, and that’s true social innovation.
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