Cultured butter favourite Pepe Saya has teamed up with the people who time forgot to crack the US market.
Brother Daniel looked right at home strutting Sydney’s groovy inner-west Enmore Road, wearing a black vest, black hat, and black pants. But, being a member of the “plain people”, the Protestant groups characterised by their rejection of the modern world, Brother Daniel was in Australia for business.
He’d come from his native Pennsylvania to check out Pepe Saya butter and the people behind it to see if they could be trusted. As a Mennonite, he was allowed to travel by plane and use a computer, whereas his Amish business colleagues were not.
“They have been ripped off so many times because they’re a handshake society,” explains Pepe Saya’s founder, Pierre “Pepe” Issa, who started the cultured-butter brand with his wife Melissa Altman in 2009.
Brother Daniel’s visit went well, so in late 2023, it was Issa’s turn to go and meet the Amish elders, the long beards with suspenders holding up their black trousers, who would decide the partnership’s fate. Arriving in Pennsylvania with his then 16-year-old son, Oliver, they were picked up from their hotel in two horse-drawn buggies. Business began with a meal, finished with some of the local speciality, shoofly pie, served with raw milk straight from a cow that Issa had needed to milk to prove he knew his way around a bovine.
The men started hurling questions at them: about the business and the flight. “In an aeroplane, do you have to bend down to get inside?” While some had, occasionally, been in cars, they had never flown.
And so began the journey that by April 2024, the Amish peoples of Lancaster County produced two tonnes of Pepe Saya cultured butter a week to sell into the US.
But how do you form a partnership with people on the other side of the world who don’t have phones or computers or even elastic in their underwear?
Amish KPIs
Pepe Saya was making 20 tonnes of its soured, cultured butter a week and was hitting the boutique market’s limits in Australia. It had been exporting to Singapore and Hong Kong since 2019, and during COVID-19 started sending some of its round packets to the Central Markets in Houston, Texas. That worked well until the government’s pandemic freight subsidy disappeared.
But they wanted to keep exploring the US option, so Altman set up a booth at New York’s Fancy Food Show in June 2023. They pulled the punters in with lashings of their cultured butter on fresh bread. A chalkboard out the front said they were looking for a dairy partner and a distributor. And along came the man in black, Brother Daniel. Brother Daniel, being allowed a few more modern amenities than his Amish friends, was manning their booth for them as an intermediary.
“We’re looking for someone to make the butter to our specs and to partner with,” Altman said.
“We could do that,” he replied. Altman was expecting some sort of tiny operation, so she asked how many cows they had.
“We have access to about 5,000.”
When she returned to Australia, she gave her husband a list of all the potential partners she’d found. He started calling them, and each of them promised they could make his butter any way he wanted, except cultured, except in a round, except everything that made Pepe Saya butter distinctive.
Altman kept asking, “Did you call Brother Daniel?”
“No, not yet.” Issa saw nothing but complications going into business with a people who time forgot. “Call brother Daniel,” she reiterated.
He rang. “These guys were exactly what we were looking for. They had the premises, they had the cows, they had the staff, which are the Amish. Their KPI [key performance indicator] was, ‘We want to sell cream at a higher price than what we get now, and we want our young people to stay in the community for work because they don’t like working outside the community’. If they go work at McDonald’s or the local service station they’ve got to wear ‘English clothes’, as they call it.”
Pepe Saya had to provide the equipment, the know-how, and sales.
Back to the 80s
Issa soon came to an agreement with the elders. Pepe Saya would bring the equipment, the know-how, and sales. The Amish provided cream and labour. Profit would be split 50-50. “They were expecting to get a lot less than that,” says Issa. “We didn’t care. We wanted to be sustainable for them and us.”
The Amish did not make cultured butter but had a long tradition in the field. “When I was doing the food safety training, standing in front of Amish girls and boys between the ages of about 15 and 25, I said, ‘Who here has made butter before?’ Every single person put their hand up.
Issa spent months there living in a cottage on Amish lands. The milking barns are dimly lit, running on batteries and the milking equipment is pneumatic, which somehow bypasses their strictures.
“The average family has 12 to 14 children. They’re the workers on the farm. Like, when I was there, a four-year-old had the job of putting the iodine on the cow’s teat.”
“You see these tiny kids running around, and there’s no daycare, but there’s like 10 siblings and heaps of relatives around to grab them. Issa drank a lot of raw milk in his four months living in a cottage on Amish lands. But raw milk sales are permitted at the farmgate in Pennsylvania, it’s not allowed to be on sold, so the butter is pasteurised.
They’re selling about two tonnes a week into the US market, which is still small compared to Australian volumes. “It’s a start,” says Issa.
Back in Australia, he communicates with his partners by email, which goes to a computer in the nearby town. The message is printed and faxed to the Amish [fax machines are allowed]. They handwrite a reply and fax it back to the office, where it is scanned and emailed to Issa.
“It feels like I’m back in the ’80s.”
