This week, the France 44 Cheese Shop turns 18 years old. Yes, yes, I know France 44 had a deli here before me, but we’re only counting in Benjamin years, ok? So we can vote now, can’t rent a car, but are excited to start attending some 18+ shows at First Ave. Our 18th year feels like a great time to be reflective, typically we ignore our anniversary, but this year feels like we are finally (finally!) becoming our mature selves.
Anyone who has been around the past 18 years (and in the before time) has witnessed about 2,234 iterations of the shop. We renovate, we move, we tinker, we add enormous additions. Most recently we did a light renovation of our dining room—opening up the space and adding comfier seating. We moved a fridge, added a freezer, built a closet for Peter to put his jacket in. All good stuff.
The past few years have felt, well, tumultuous. There was that pandemic, which really altered the vibes of our shop, and it has taken us years to feel like ourselves again. Two years ago, we battled some gnarly construction which took any wind out of our sails and set us back both financially and emotionally.
And then, just when we needed it the most, we had 2025. What a fantastic year for the cheese shop and our foods business as a whole. The event space really discovered its identity as a home for beautiful celebrations and unique educational offerings. We had some staff turnover, and all our new folks were home runs, and we entered the holiday season with the best crew of humans in a very long time.
Now we can look to the future and the possibilities that lay ahead. We have some fun stuff planned for 2026—new offerings that we think (hope) will delight you and that will give us even more reasons to come by and spend some time hanging out with us. After 18 years in food retail, my personal motivation remains strong, and our core imperatives remain the same:
- To provide a great place to work for our employees. Treat them with respect, give them opportunities to learn and grow and make sure their employment with us is sustainable. Our business is impossible to run successfully without happy, engaged employees.
- To treat our business partners with the same kind of service that we would treat our employees. 90% of our purchases are still with family owned or independently owned businesses. We wouldn’t exist without smaller producers or local distributors.
- To provide a warm and inviting experience for our customers. They should feel happier when they leave our shop than when they entered. A sandwich should make their day better, they should be looking forward to going home and sharing that piece of beautiful cheese with someone they like. I really like the word conviviality. It conjures up images of people laughing and eating together. It’s about as far away from AI robots as I can possibly imagine. Do AI bots even like cheese?
I am grateful to my staff, to our business partners, and to the customers who have supported and enabled me to grow up here over the past 18 years.
