Elizabeth Chubbuck is the big cheese
Murray’s Cheese Chief Strategy Officer on innovation and scaling the 60 year old shop.
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Murray’s Cheese Shop is a beloved Greenwich Village shop that has been serving New York City since 1962. Since then, the store has expanded operations around the city, started an in-house cheese cave program, and entered into a partnership with Kroger grocery stores that features a curated selection of specialty cheeses in more than 1200 stores.
Elizabeth Chubbuck has worked at Murray’s for over a decade. Starting in the wholesale business, she more recently became the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, overseeing the wholesale, catering, events & experiences, retail, ecomm, and marketing orgs. We chatted about Murray’s cheese caves, innovation and developing new cheese flavors, and scaling a 60 year old business.
Brianna Plaza: Can you tell me a little bit about your background and your role as Murray’s Chief Strategy Office?
Elizabeth Chubbuck: I studied French and Spanish language and literature in college, and I like to say that a career in cheese is the most logical career path for a liberal arts education. I ended up getting a job at Hearst Magazines and worked at Cosmo and Good Housekeeping. In my last job at Good Housekeeping, I was selling advertising for food and packaged goods and some pharmaceuticals, but at the same time, I was entertaining my advertising clients by taking them to Murray's for cheese classes.
I very quickly realized that for my clients, it was just a good time, but I was on the edge of my seat learning about milk chemistry and the political history of cheese. I quickly began volunteering in the classroom, and I did that for two and a half years.
I realized that all of my personal interests, my disposable income, and my entire value system were based on real food and sustainable food systems. I grew up in Central Illinois and my uncle farms the land my grandfather grew up on. My agriculture roots are really part of who I am. I realized that all my values were oriented one way and I was selling advertising for Chef Boyardee Ravioli, and it just clicked. There was a job in the Murray’s wholesale business and I took a huge pay cut and went for the job.
I remember talking to my mom the day before I signed the contract. I was like, "I don't think it's a good decision." My mom said, "Your father and I agree, we really don't think it's a good decision to take this job." I did it anyway and started in the wholesale business.
I’ve always excelled at identifying opportunities to create systems or strategies to streamline ways of working. That specific part of my skillset is just something I've replicated over and over throughout my career in order to propel myself forward. After leading the wholesale business, I took on our e-commerce business, then brought our marketing team underneath me, then that launched my role as chief strategy officer. I realized we needed a way to coordinate those operations together as a team.
Brianna Plaza: I know that Murray’s has their own caves, but you also have a network of partners. How does the business model work?
Elizabeth Chubbuck: We have about 20 different cheeses that we age exclusively in our caves in Long Island City. Some of them we call cave-aged cheeses. Those are cheeses where the affinage process closely mimics the way they would be aged in their natural place of origin. Loire Valley goat cheeses are typically aged in a very specific way in France and are exported with the rind intact. We have seen over the years that exporting those delicate young cheeses is not great for quality and longevity once they get to the US. We have a whole collection of Loire Valley cheeses that we age in our own caves as close as possible to the way they would be aged in France.
This allows us to bring a product to market almost exactly as it would be there. The rind is in better condition, the cheese has a longer shelf life. It's just a more stable product and better quality. That in particular has given us a big foothold with restaurants and chefs in New York City because they know those cheeses and appreciate the improved quality we bring to them.
Then we also have our own cave aged reserve line, which are cheeses that we have developed in collaboration with other cheese makers. A good example of this is our Greensward which begins its life as the same cheese as Harbison from Jasper Hill. Jasper Hill sends us batches of unaged Harbison which we process differently, so we bring a cheese to market that is distinctly different. You put the two side by side and you can see they have similarities, but they're very different. One is a wash rind and really stinky. The other one is a bloomy rind, more of like a mushroomy-dry-white rind on the outside of it.
We also have cave aged originals, where we developed the recipe ourselves and are aging the cheese, and we're the only business that has it. We have a really robust innovation process where we plan one to two years out for these limited releases. Sometimes they become permanent collections, sometimes it's a one and done, sometimes they'll release a different year.
We’re not manufacturers so we don’t age cheese in other people’s caves. We sell cheeses that are made by other people but I wouldn’t say we work with a network of caves.
Brianna Plaza: How do you decide what partners you work with?
Elizabeth Chubbuck: There's a lot of trust that is required for a cheesemaker to say, "Yes, I will give you my baby cheeses and let you do something with them." At this point, we've established a reputation for being able to age cheeses very well. Because of that, cheesemakers are more willing to let us experiment with their cheeses, but it's always a conversation. They have to trust that we're going to do something good with the product. I heard one of our affineurs say, "We don't want to take a cheese into our caves and make it just okay." It has to be as good as if the cheesemaker aged it themselves. If it's not, then we have no business doing it. We're really fortunate that we've received awards for cheeses in our caves.
Brianna Plaza: The caves opened a while into the business, why then was it a smart business decision to open your own caves?
Elizabeth Chubbuck: The Loire Valley goat cheeses were a big reason for that. We opened the original cheese caves in 2004, and at the time we'd been the sole importer of really excellent cheeses from a French affineur called Hervé Mons. We began importing and selling his cheeses in our stores, and they were fabulous. He helped us realize that we could be aging cheese ourselves, specifically with these Loire Valley goat cheeses.
We had this space in the basement of our Bleecker Street store that we weren’t doing a lot with and we thought that building caves was very much in the spirit of Murray’s. “What could be possible in this space? What would it take to get there?" Then we let our imaginations run wild and then we figured out if we can put a business case around it.
Brianna Plaza: You talked a little about innovation, but how do you invent a new cheese flavor?
Elizabeth Chubbuck: We have a really pretty robust and well-established collaborative process. The teams meet monthly and they will taste things that are in the R&D process, and they will look at what we need to plan for and then we let our imaginations run wild. It has to be delicious, but the question is always, "What is going to surprise and delight our customers?” Our brand purpose is to satisfy everyone's appetite for great cheese, new discoveries, and real community. I think that a lot of the collaborations in our cave's really pull on those three pillars.
The team gets together and says, "What might work? What have we never experimented with from an ingredient perspective?" Sometimes we'll look at what's selling really well. We have this smoked apple Gouda dip that's working really well. We're like, "What might we do with Gouda in the future?" Customers tell us what they're interested in and then we'll also take that to the creative process. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail.
Brianna Plaza: How do you balance the idea of what is selling well now with the fact that cheese is a slow process?
Elizabeth Chubbuck: Well, cheese is like the anti-trend. Cheese moves so slowly that there is no way cheese can be on trend unless it's just happenstance that a cheese that exists becomes the new trend. It takes many, many years to develop a really good cheese. In that case, because we're already working with great cheeses, it takes a little bit less time for us to get from ideation to finished product.
We have the idea and then we look ahead and say, "All right, if apples and Gouda were trending in the fall of this year, let's see if we can plan something maybe like a cider-washed Gouda for next year.” We don't have a cider washed Gouda at this point, but something like that. We have to be thinking about the future and we'll look at trends and then push forward a year later or look seasonally to say, "When do we think this might be relevant again?"
Brianna Plaza: As you’ve scaled the business and joined in partnership with Kroger, how do you maintain quality and the small New York business feel?
Elizabeth Chubbuck: I always say New York is just the tip of the iceberg. Kroger took a minority investment stake in Murray’s in 2012/2013, but at that point, we already had many stores within their locations. They were really familiar with us and our business model. Kroger approached us originally because of what we do in New York. They have been very intentional in the fact that they've really allowed our New York businesses to continue to operate independently.
Our businesses here in New York are small, nimble, and a little bit scrappier. In New York, we operate very, very independently, but we're able to take advantage of some of the stability and resources that are offered because we're a subsidiary of larger organization.
We have a team that’s dedicated to New York operations and we have a team that's dedicated to running our business within Kroger. We both report into the same president and we find ways to add value back and forth to the business typically in the form of ideas and innovation, but the models don't overlap very much, and that really allows us to retain what we do. Our Kroger selection and our New York selection are based on a core group of products that are consistent across both.