Emerald Valley Artisans’ business has gone from wholesale to retail
Alisa Fava Fasnacht grew up in Scenery Hill, with a farm family rooted in Italy and many of its traditions. They included food, of course – all kinds of food, and lots of it. The Favas were a resourceful clan that drew from every element of the food pyramid.
“Our mother (Antoinette) and grandmother (Lucia) were extremely gifted when it came to the kitchen,” Fasnacht says. “That was natural, but some of it was born out of necessity. My mother and her family were poor, but they didn’t know it because they had a garden and they used everything. Everything. They’d have leftovers, and sometimes, no matter what they were, they ended up in a soup. We were on a farm and worked all the time. The one time we stopped working was when we ate. We grew up with amazing food.”
The family’s culinary tradition continues. Fasnacht and her sister, Racquelle Rockwell, are co-owners of Emerald Valley Artisans, a company that makes artisanal cheeses and sells them to restaurants and other food outlets in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. It is mostly a wholesale and distribution operation whose top customers are Parkhurst Dining, Paragon Food and Gordon Food.
Courtesy The Porch at Schenley
The butternut squash pizza at the Porch at Siena in Upper St. Clair features smoked chicken, squash puree, roasted onions, pickled peppers, Emerald Valley feta and fried parsley.
Parkhurst, the commercial subsidiary of Eat’n Park Hospitality Group, is Emerald Valley’s largest customer. It runs a number of restaurants that include The Porch at Siena (Upper St. Clair), The Porch at Schenley (Oakland) and Six Penn Kitchen (which will be closing this month in Downtown Pittsburgh).
The sisters also market their products at regional events – such as the Observer Publishing Company’s Corks & Kegs Festival – and operate a retail store at 145 S. Main St., Washington, where they sell their cheeses, gift baskets and wines, spirits and other artisanal items from mostly local producers.
Their plan when they opened the “pop-up” store in early November was to keep it going through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, to gauge public interest. An early January shutdown was possible. Business, however, was brisk, and the store remains.
“A lot of people would ask, ‘Where can we buy your cheese?’ That’s why we decided to do this,” says Rockwell, Emerald Valley’s sales manager. “It was time for a retail presence. This is what people wanted and why we’re here.”
Now the sisters, graduates of the old Mon Valley Catholic High School, have an identity. “Everyone calls Racquelle and me the ‘Cheese Ladies,'” Fasnacht says.
Courtesy Edible Allegheny
Courtesy Edible Allegheny
Alisa Fava Fasnacht & Alan Fasnacht pose for a February 2018 photo.
They are in the food business thanks to a serendipitous series of events that began 14 years ago, at their parents’ farm on Fava Farm Road near the Century Inn, when Fasnacht and her mother started playing around with batches of ricotta cheese.
Mother and daughter’s cheesy experiment eventually morphed into Emerald Valley Artisans, a business based at the parents’ home. Fasnacht and her husband, Alan, who also have a Scenery Hill farm, worked at developing different varieties, leading to the company making 11 types of hard cheeses plus two styles of the softer ricotta.
Only milk from cows owned by the family and other local farmers is used, but the cheeses are made in central Pennsylvania, at Penn Cheese in Winfield, an hour north of Harrisburg. Emerald Valley has a storage facility for its cheeses in Republic, near Brownsville.
Cheese-making, the sisters say, is an inexact science, a trial-and-error type of process at times. “We did a few experimental things and some didn’t work,” Fasnacht explains.
Yet there certainly have been trial-and-successful outcomes. Their products have won national and state awards, including their newest one: orange cranberry apple fromage blanc, which was unveiled in 2017.
April Harrington
Production, Fasnacht adds, can be time-consuming. “It depends on the type of cheese. Flavor comes from aging, but there are other factors: the cows, the time of year milk was produced and environmental factors like whether it’s been a dry year or a wet year.”
One variety, which the sisters have labeled “Italina,” is aged for 30 months. “It’s very bold,” Fasnacht says, showing a slice of a cheese that is drier than varieties that haven’t been aged for so long.
Ricotta Chiesi, an Emerald Valley specialty, is pressed while warm – making it firmer – and is briefly salt-brined. It is available in this natural state or infused with Italian black summer truffles. The name is a tribute to relatives of the Fava family who live in the Po Valley region of Italy, the clan’s ancestral home.
That selection, Fasnacht says, “started with the original idea of coming up with a ricotta salata. We made batches of another cheese and liked the flavor. One day, we stuck it in a skillet and it didn’t melt, but browned beautifully. (Making cheese) is like a culinary canvas.”
So is marketing it. “The wholesale side of this is very successful,” says Rockwell, whose transition to sales was easy. She was a sales representative for 13 years with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, serving Washington, Greene and Fayette counties.
She has helped to make Emerald Valley a big cheese among local businesses. The sisters are pleased with what has transpired and pledge to continue what they are doing.
“I don’t think we ever stop,” Fasnacht says. “We keep pressing.”