Family, passion are key ingredients for Caputo Bros. Creamery

The story of Caputo Bros. Creamery is one fermented with love.

It began with a little boy from Burlington County whose bond with an Italian grandmother, who spoke little English, was through food, especially Amedea Caputo's meatballs. She used to pop them into grandson David's mouth as soon as he arrived at her Newark home.

"Food was my language with her," David Caputo said, describing "a lot of smiling and cheek-pinching and then the food would come out."

Later in life, his heart would be captured by another woman, Rynn Robinson, whom Caputo, of Tabernacle, met at the Jersey Shore on Labor Day weekend 2003. The couple would marry in Philadelphia in May 2005.

Their decision to ditch careers in the pharmaceutical industry - his in sales, hers in information technology - and start an Italian cheese business in Pennsylvania's York County, 20 miles northeast of Gettysburg, was inspired by a romantic honeymoon dinner in a two-table restaurant in Tahiti.

The couple at the other table were chefs who owned an Italian restaurant in Connecticut. The next day, the Caputos met a pastry chef.

"I really feel like, those two days, God was shouting at us," Rynn Caputo said recently during an interview at the dairy that Caputo Bros. Creamery uses to produce its Cagliata - Italian for cheese curd.

The Caputos heeded the call - and today are the astonished operators of a company with a rare mozzarella that can be found on the menu of some of Philadelphia's trendiest restaurants and an additional 40 eateries throughout the country. They also make ricotta and aged mozzarella.

"The quality is exceptionally high," said Joe Cicala, chef-owner of East Passyunk Avenue's Brigantessa, where Caputo cheese curd is hand-stretched by staff before being applied to pizza. "You cannot beat this quality cheese."

In December, Caputo Bros. won the Brewing the American Dream Pitch Room Competition in New York City, where the judges included the founder of Samuel Adams Brewery, Jim Koch, and celebrity chef David Burke. The prize was $10,000 and a free year of business coaching from Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream, a program that assists start-ups.

"I felt like we had just won an Oscar," Rynn Caputo said.

Such vaunted status for the 3 1/2-year-old company of seven employees with headquarters in Spring Grove is "crazy," she added, considering that at the outset, "we were capitalized to be a small family business who sold mozzarella at farmer's markets."

In three months, they had outgrown the 40-gallon fermenting kettle they thought would meet their needs for five years.

Now, a 400-gallon tank enables production of 1,200 pounds of cheese a week, with a $400,000 build-out underway of a 3,000-square-foot facility near the Caputo home in Spring Grove. It will enable Caputo Bros. to "make in one day what we make in a week," Rynn Caputo said.

"A lot of our destiny depends on how much cheese we can make," she said, adding that the company has had to turn down supply requests from Williams-Sonoma and Whole Foods.

It's an astonishing evolution for a business that began after a honeymoon-inspired career turnabout.

The Caputos first moved to Philadelphia so David could attend culinary school and put some of his training to practical use at Bistro 7 in their Old City neighborhood. Then, the newlyweds relocated to Italy in January 2006 for a four-month master's culinary program in Calabria.

They returned to the United States with "a fire in our belly" to spread what true Italian cuisine tastes like by opening a restaurant, Rynn Caputo said. But restaurant jobs in Virginia Beach convinced them that line of work would not be conducive to another of their priorities - starting a family.

Meanwhile, at home, they had been making mozzarella that drew raves from family and friends.

So off to a cheese-making course in Vermont they went, before settling in central Pennsylvania to pursue their dream.

By the time they opened Caputo Bros. in July 2011, they had two sons, Giovanni and Matteo, for whom the business is named. Their silhouettes form the company logo.

The Caputos would discover that just 10 minutes from their home was Apple Valley Creamery in East Berlin, Adams County, whose milk is used for Caputo Bros. cheese and where production will continue until the new plant opens in summer.

Caputo Bros. says it is the only U.S. maker of cheese curd that's fully fermented (eight hours vs. the 30 minutes when adding vinegar or citric acid to milk to shortcut the process) to stretch into fresh mozzarella.

Chefs and farmer's market operators loved it but were concerned with its couple of days' shelf life.

So the Caputos experimented with freezing their curd, selling it that way for purchasers to thaw and stretch when needed. It was an instant hit, now available at www.caputobrotherscreamery.com.

The need for ongoing capital investment has kept the company just shy of profitability, Rynn Caputo said. Sales in 2014 exceeded $500,000.

That included income from two other ventures the Caputos have started to pay the bills and spread their passion for authentic Italian cooking: La Tavola, a communal-table-style restaurant open for lunch Wednesdays and dinner Fridays and Saturdays, and guided cuisine tours to Italy.

"We owe it to people to share what we've learned," David Caputo said, "and what we love."

215-854-2466 @dmastrull