“It’s the love that makes this company special,” smiles Maria Alejandra Grotewold, Administrative Manager of the 32-year old cheesemaking company in Guatemala set up by her father in 1990. “My dad really loves making cheese, so it was born of passion and love, and there’s always been that heart keeping everything together.”

Maria’s father, CEO Oscar Grotewold, is now 72, and three years ago, Maria took over some of the company management from her elderly parents. She has a business and marketing degree, but nevertheless, she says it’s been the biggest challenge of her life to navigate the company - Grupo Los de Aquí - Lacteos Chicacsi - through the worst of the Covid pandemic, and to work alongside her father for the first time.

“I said to him, I know how to manage business, but I don’t know how to make cheese!” Maria laughs. “He said, you’re now a grown-up, I’ll give you more responsibility. But my daddy and I are so alike – I’m the female version of my dad - so it was a challenge not to be fighting all day long. He wants one thing, I want another, so getting together with our ideas and making them work has been challenging.”

Grupo Los de Aquí - Lacteos Chicacsi is based in Alta Verapaz in the northern highlands of Guatemala and produces a number of dairy products including pure cream, butter, fresh cheese, mozzarella, ricotta and yogurt, all using milk from small, local farmers. The dairy products sell in larger supermarkets as well as neighbourhood grocery stores known in Guatemala as tiendas de barrio. “This is one of the reasons I have been looking for help,” says Maria. “We have a net revenue of more or less USD40,000 a year. A very big operation for a short utility.”

The artisanal factory also produces one of Guatemala’s top-selling cow’s milk cheeses, Queso Fresco, well-loved because, as Maria says, “it’s very Latino - you can put it with your black beans, you can have it on your platanitos”. Another popular product is string cheese, derived, according to Maria, from an old, secret recipe given to her father by the best cheesemaker in Guatemala. “No-one can replicate it, and everyone wants to,’ Maria confides mysteriously.

Amid the stories and tradition, Maria is now concentrating on future-facing the cheesemaking company, supported in part by a virtual consultancy funded by Swisscontact. With lockdowns already hitting Guatemala – but with cheesemaking considered a critical sector - a virtual consultancy was put in place to support the business.