The World's First Cheese Factory

For centuries, cheese in Switzerland was made high in the Alps, where summer herds grazed and dairymen worked alone. That changed in 1815, when Rudolf Emanuel von Effinger, the lord of Kiesen castle near Thun, built a valley cheese dairy and ran it as a cooperative — the first of its kind in the Emmental region.

Instead of one alp producing one wheel, farmers across the valley pooled their daily milk into a single building. This let cheesemaking run year-round on the lowland plateau rather than only in the mountains during summer.

Pooling the village’s milk turned a seasonal Alpine craft into a standardised, year-round industry.

The model spread fast. By around 1850 Switzerland had roughly 180 village dairies, more than half of them in the Canton of Bern. The original Kiesen building still stands and has housed Switzerland’s National Dairy Museum since 1974, marking the birthplace of industrial cheese.