Great Lakes Cheese: Keeping cool through a power outage
If you buy cheese in the United States, there’s a good chance it was distributed by Great Lakes Cheese, an FM client headquartered in Hiram, Ohio.
This pillar of the dairy aisle sells everything from Swiss to Gouda, from slices to shreds, from mild to extra sharp. It’s also a major employer in the Hiram area, known as much for its good pay and benefits as it is for its culture of teamwork and camaraderie.
So for Great Lakes Cheese, downtime is not an option. That’s why, when workers noticed the lights flickering one day in August 2024, they knew they had a problem.
A storm was rolling through the area, spinning out tornadoes and knocking down power lines. Great Lakes Cheese didn’t suffer direct storm damage, but the electricity from the grid was out. And the race—a race to refrigerate a lot of cheese—was on.
The sting of the loss that resulted from this outage could have gone any number of ways, from mild to extra sharp. Relying on robust contingency plans, spur-of-the-moment thinking and a strong partnership with FM, Great Lakes Cheese turned what could have been a crisis into a manageable loss. “We always come together,” said Great Lakes Cheese Warehouse Manager Rick Sokolowski. “No matter what it is.”
Inside an empire of cheese
Walk through the Great Lakes Cheese’s Hiram facility and you will eventually notice two things: the smell of cheese, and the sight of your own breath.
Every step of this process happens in the cold, from quarter-ton blocks of cheese to the box headed for a grocery store’s private-label inventory. Because of these refrigeration needs, Great Lakes Cheese has always had emergency plans in place in the event of a power outage.
“They really care about being protected,” said Ryan Primiano, an FM staff engineering specialist who was previously the account engineer for Great Lakes Cheese.
When the power went out, the company swung into action, scrambling to find generators anywhere they could and working to move product to other facilities. But the generators wouldn’t arrive right away, and the battery-powered forklifts to move product soon started to die.
With the clock ticking, and restoration potentially weeks away, the company implemented a unique part of its contingency plan: Drivers pulled dozens of refrigerated trucks up to the warehouse’s loading bays, set the trucks at their coldest air settings, and let the cool air from the trucks waft into the 650,000-square-foot facility.
What happened next was a bit of extra improvisation: Workers ran out to hardware stores to buy portable fans to help blow cold air from the refrigerated trucks throughout the facility.
“To let $100 million worth of inventory go bad wasn’t an option for us,” said the company’s Vice President of Technology and Business Development Matt Wilkinson, who made his own trip to the hardware store. Everything, and everybody, was keeping cool. Three days into the outage, the power finally came back on. And the vast majority of the cheese was saved.
And the grocery store customers that depend on upwards of a 97% fill rate? They never noticed a thing.
“That builds trust and confidence,” said Great Lakes Cheese Vice President of Retail Sales Michele Radecki.Filing a claim
As soon as FM General Adjuster Pierre Huguley got involved in adjusting the loss, he knew he had to be there in person. He was on site the very next day.
“Whatever was going on that day was gone,” Huguley said. “’I’m here now—what do you need?’”
When Huguley arrived, the power was back on. Great Lakes Cheese had notified FM about the incident right away, but didn’t file the claim until later. Because of how nimbly Great Lakes Cheese responded, the property damage and business interruption losses were minimal. Under its policy with FM, though, Great Lakes Cheese was also able to recover for work that went into keeping the facility cool during the outage.
“Our experience with FM and with Pierre was exceptional,” said Wilkinson, the Great Lakes Cheese VP. “He was here to try to help us resolve a problem.”
These days, things are back to normal at Great Lakes Cheese—some lessons learned, some stories of hardware trips still proudly retold.
But the thing that got Great Lakes Cheese through the outage has been there all along: hard work, honesty and integrity—values that still matter even when the power goes out.
“That’s when we shine as a company,” said Great Lakes Cheese Assistant Plant Manager Steve Plate. “We make it happen, one way or another.”