It was one hour till showtime, and outside an industrial building in East Williamsburg, people were already lining up. Inside, the warehouse was bustling and fragrant. The event had been described as a secret sale, and the team was operating not unlike undercover agents. They had walkie-talkies, (joke) code names, and a mission: Sell hundreds of pounds of cheese.
This was the scene on Saturday at the latest C. Hesse Cheese warehouse sale. At the center of it all was Caroline Hesse, the 33-year-old maestro of the New York City cheese scene, who has owned and operated her wholesale distribution business since 2022. Here’s how it works: Hesse buys artisanal cheese from creameries and manufacturers across the US and Europe. She sells it to clients, including buzzy New York restaurants like Michelin-starred Bridges, Wild Cherry, and Le Veau d’Or (for which she had a cart specially made for table-side cheese service). And once a month, she turns her warehouse into a shop, inviting people to come by, sip some natural wine, taste cheeses, and buy their favorites.
Along with her growing profile on TikTok, recent press—a Food52 Instagram post, a write-up in the food media startup Caper, and a talk show appearance on Tamron Hall—has brought a spike in attention to Hesse’s business, and she quickly sold out the 500 free RSVP spots for this month’s sale. As she prepared to open the doors for hundreds of people, Hesse was giving her team their marching (or mongering) orders, wearing a bandana and jeans with embroidered patches.
As the sale started, a line began to snake around the block. While people waited, they chatted and made new friends, waxing poetic about cheese. There were dairy lovers of all ages, with toddlers running down the hall; one restless kid asked his mom what his prize would be for standing in line for so long. “Your prize is cheese,” she replied.
Once inside, after descending a metal staircase and making their way through a fluorescent cinder block-lined hallway, a bounty of cheese awaited. There was—deep breath—baby gouda, aged gouda, nettle gouda, a Vermont cheddar called Bandaged Bismark, a soft goat’s milk cheese from Wisconsin called Linedeline, a ball-shaped cheese from Switzerland (which looked sort of like paint chips), Parmigiano-Reggiano, a triple-cream brie from New York, a blue cheese from Minnesota, and Alp Blossom, a German scene-stealer with dried flowers and herbs on the rind, among others. To a soundtrack of disco, pop, and rock—think “Hips Don’t Lie” and “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”—attendees tasted cheese, sipped wine, filled their baskets, and went back for seconds and thirds.
Among the shoppers was Jamie Shapiro, who came with her mother and sister. “We have a baby’s worth of cheese—including baby gouda,” said Shapiro, gesturing to her family’s seven-to-nine-pound haul. She also noted they recently went on a family trip to Italy, where they embarked on a parmigiana pilgrimage of sorts. “We stood in the stacks and stacks and stacks of cheese. This was the logical next step,” she added.
Also present were cheese sale VIPs Joan and Tom Mulry, who have been fans of Hesse since the beginning, first finding her in 2020 when she was working at Crown Finish Cheese, an aging facility where she ran the wholesale business side. “We try and show up each month if we can,” Joan said. The Mulrys come for the cheese (and butter—which Hesse set aside for them among the chaos), but they also come for Hesse.
“She loves what she does,” Joan said. “When it comes to this, you certainly feel the joy coming off her,” Tom added.
There was at least one non-human cheese fan, too. Namely, a chihuahua called Waffle (full name: Waffle Orangejello Cucamonga) who came with his owners, Jared Hatch and Joel Salinas, and their friend Samm Mackin. At the sale, Waffle enjoyed morsels of gouda, but Hatch said he generally loves a sharp cheddar. As for what brought them to the sale, Hatch said: “I love warehouses and behind-the-scenes old New York industry stuff. This feels like a business that is providing an experience that allows people to see under the hood, like how the cheese is made, if you will.”
“It’s like: farmers market meets wine and cheese cocktail hour, meets sample sale,” Mackin added.
Hesse’s father, John, was at the sale to help ring shoppers up; her parents attend almost every month. For many years, John worked as a chef at restaurants in Manhattan and on Long Island, where Hesse grew up. As a result, she was immersed in the food industry from a young age. “I always wanted to keep her out of the restaurant business,” John said. “And she managed to kind of sneak in the back door, and she’s in the food business.” Did his profession play a role in guiding her career? “I have a very sensitive palate, you know, I taste for a living. And she inherited that,” he added.
For Hesse, whose passion for her work has helped her persevere through the dark days and challenges of running a small business, the fact that hundreds of people came to Saturday’s sale made her reflect on why she started the warehouse sales in the first place. It was January 2023, and she was completely out of money. She just needed to sell some cheese to get some cash flow. Over the last couple years, she said, she was happy if a sale broke $1000. On Saturday, she made more than 10 times that.
Surveying the scene, Kati Doggett said, “It’s like a big room of strangers that you know would be good at a dinner party.” Another shopper, Kaitlyn Alkass, added, “I could tell everyone was disgruntled on the way in, but everyone’s really happy on the way out.”
The joy was as palpable as the warm, nutty aroma of cheese. People were laughing and canoodling, and coming together to trade notes on each taste. For Hesse, this is what the whole business is about. “Cheese for me is a vehicle for love and joy, and enjoyment, and people getting together,” she said. “It’s like things that I believe really deeply in, and cheese is just kind of my vessel for that.”
