Jul 22, 2020


Jeff and Jenna Fenwick each run their own businesses out of a picturesque farm property on the Mississippi River off the Gulley Road in North Frontenac.

Both businesses, Back Forty Cheese, and Jenna Rose Designs, have felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back Forty Cheese was hit the hardest, the earliest. Much of Jeff’s production of sheep’s milk cheese ends up in restaurants across Ontario, much of it in Ottawa and Toronto. In March all of those sales were halted. Jeff was in production, and he had orders in for milk from five farms, when he realised he had to change everything he was doing. He slowed down production, began selling cheese through social media and delivering it across the region once a week, increased sales to stores where he could, and took stock of the fact that another of his major sources of revenue, summer sales at his cheese factory store and at two large events each summer, were also not going to happen.

Jenna sells most of her Jenna Rose screen-printed fabric products online through her website, and those sales have not been affected by COVID-19.

In fact there is a hot new timely Jennarose.ca product.

According to Jeff, Jenna resisted requests to begin making and selling masks for months, but now that masks are mandatory, she now has an entire line of masks available at Jennarose.ca.

No sense rushing to look because they are sold out at the moment but will be available again on July 26th.

She will likely not be attending the one massive retail show that she attends each year, the One of a Kind show in Toronto, which will cut into annual sales.

Now, five months into the pandemic, and with restaurant sales starting to pick up just a bit, Jeff is not jumping into any large increase in cheese production. He has kept producing all along, on a smaller scale than normal, and while he is no longer offering delivery, as of the end of June, increased store sales have taken up some of the slack and since there is always work to be done on a rural property, he intends to keep his production at the same level for the time being.

“One of the farms that supplies me with sheep’s milk, the largest one in fact, found another buyer for milk, so I let them go and am keeping the supply from everyone else, so no one is stuck with milk they can’t sell, which was a concern of mine back in March,” Jeff said, in a phone interview earlier this week.

“It takes time to increase production, and it takes more milk. And we don’t know what is going to happen in the fall, it may all shut down again. I’m ok with where we are at now.”

Back Forty Cheese is available at artisancheese.ca for online ordering and curbside pickup. It is also now available at Mike Dean’s Local Grocers in Sharbot Lake, at the Seed to Sausage store on Road 38, and at Foodsmiths in Perth.

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