2024 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner: Paula Lambert, Mozzarella Company

Even as a young person, industry veteran Paula Lambert was interested in cheese.

As a child, she was also enamored by the giant wheels of cheddar cheese she would see at the local butcher shop.“When I was a teenager, I even liked cottage cheese,” she said. 

A bike trip along the Wisconsin Dells while away at boarding school ignited Lambert’s love of cheese from a production perspective. She and her friends stopped at delis while on the road and tasted the freshest, handmade cheeses. This flame was later stoked by a trip to Italy where she fell in love with the breadth of cheese varietals across the region.

Upon returning home, Lambert wanted to bring special cheeses to her local community in Dallas: “The one thing I loved most in Italy that you couldn’t get much of in Dallas was the fresh mozzarella cheese. It was hard to find in the U.S. at the time outside of New York and Boston.” So, she founded the Mozzarella Company in 1982, an artisanal cheese company that has flourished for over 40 years.

Lambert is a pioneer in the specialty cheese industry who helped usher in artisan European and Mexican cheeses to an American audience with her women-led business.

“The company is owned by a woman and all the cheesemakers are women,” she explained.

In addition to being an accomplished business owner, she is a cookbook author and has won a James Beard Award for Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America. Over the course of her career, Lambert has worked with many industry organizations, including the American Cheese Society and the American Dairy Goat Association, and served as a board member at the Specialty Food Association.

Although her brand specialized in mozzarella and ricotta cheeses at the outset, she soon became interested in American regional cuisine and began emulating the flavors and concepts she saw modern chefs implement into their dishes.

“In Dallas and throughout Texas we had Southwestern cuisine,” she explained. “These people were my clients and friends, and I would incorporate what they were cooking into my cheeses to become more regional.”

Lambert was always eager to learn from her peers. She eventually explored Mexican regional cheeses by visiting the country to work with artisanal, small-batch cheesemakers to learn their process. Then she moved on to France, then Greece, to do the same.

“Wherever I went, I would taste and watch and learn. They would even let me come to their back rooms,” she said. “Then I would take what I learned and create my own product. It was great that I could expand like that because my thought was, ‘Well if someone buys mozzarella maybe they will buy goat cheese too.’” 

In this way, the openness of the specialty food industry helped Lambert build her brand. She was struck by the global sense of community nurtured by her fellow makers.

“I love the specialty food industry. There are so many people from so many different backgrounds, and they are creative, diverse, intelligent, and friendly,” she said. “It’s not cutthroat competition—it’s polite.”

When it comes to specialty cheese, Lambert is passionate about flavor.

“There are so many variants and so much to learn, taste, and discover. You can keep doing this your whole life,” she said. “When you travel it opens your mind and opens your senses. I love the way culture and history play a part in the cheese and specialty food world. And there’s always innovation.”

Devoted to the experiential aspects of enjoying food, Lambert regularly organizes trips to Europe where she helps guide others to understand the flavors, processes, and history behind various culinary experiences.

Lambert retired at the end of 2023, selling the business to her employees. To honor Lambert, the employees changed the logo by replacing the original drawing of the male chef with an image of Lambert herself. She explained that the modification also depicts the women-run nature of the business.

Lambert’s advice for specialty food leaders: “Being a leader, you need to step back and listen to people, then only form your opinions after listening. It’s hard and you need to be gentle. It takes a long time to learn that, especially if you’re a strong person.”