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Would you like to eat Michelin-star-restaurant-worthy cheese from a vending machine near you?
Perrystead Dairy has been in Olde Kensington for five years now, delivering hand-crafted cheese to its neighbors and beyond. Their cheese has won 29 major domestic and international awards and been featured at top restaurants, including Zahav, Emmet, Fork, Her Place Supper Club, Provenance and Friday Saturday Sunday.
And yes, you can buy this coveted cheese — as well as a selection of cured meats — at a vending machine right outside of the Perrystead Dairy facility.
“We call (it) the dispensary, by the way,” said Yoav Perry, founder and managing partner. “We never call it a vending machine, because it’s more fun.”
The dispensary works like this: you press an arrow to turn a wheel that rotates the cheeses, and then once you’ve paid via a credit card or Apple Pay, you can open a little compartment and pull out your desired dairy product.
“Most people live within the surrounding, I’d say, 20-25 blocks, they use it as part of their regular weekly shopping, or they go there after the stores are closed,” Perry said. “They’re having a guest coming over, and there’s a cheese emergency. We have the people that come in late at night after the clubs close, or people go into a wine bar and they decide to bring their own cheese.”
If the idea of acquiring your cheese from a machine throws you off, don’t worry, you are not alone.
“I don’t know how I feel about it being in a vending machine instead of like in a traditional fridge,” said Fishtown resident Mae Dumont.
“I think it’s really interesting, I love cheese, so it’s kind of cool that there’s cheese I can get whenever I want,” she added. “But I don’t know…”
Dumont may have a point. Vending machines are typically associated with factory-made sealed items that are so processed, they could last a decade. They do not usually have gourmet hand-made cheese with bacterial cultures that could spoil rather quickly if things go wrong.
And yet, Perry said that the cheese is located in that very dispensary — which is well refrigerated — because he realized that it was actually his most sanitary option to get his product out to the neighborhood.
Could an oyster vending machine be next?
Perrystead’s location in Olde Kensington is not a cheese shop. Unlike say, Di Bruno Brothers, where you can waltz in, pick from a selection of cheeses behind the counter and have a monger wrap it up, the building is the facility where Perrystead makes their cheeses. If you go inside, you can see cheese being made.
“We’re an FDA-inspected facility in the business of growing bacteria. So, you know, it’s a very small facility,” Perry explained. “It’s 1,300 square feet, and I do not have the space to create a retail corner in there.”
What’s more, having people simply come inside to inquire about buying cheese posed a health-risk.
“People were walking in with muddy boots and dogs,” Perry said. “And I’m like, no, no! I can’t have this. This is not a good scene.”
That’s when the idea for the dispensary came along. Putting a covered vending machine outside the creamery would let customers buy what they wanted without coming in and potentially contaminating good products. To Perry, who grew up in Israel, the idea didn’t seem so strange or novel.
“In Europe, you can also get oysters in a vending machine and eggs and milk and all these other things,” he said. “I really was just thinking of a solution to a problem. I wasn’t really thinking, ‘Oh, let’s do this. It’s going to be viral.’“
The dispensary, of course, did go viral. Once the fridge was up and running, Perry sent a video of it to his friend, CookNSolo restauranteur Michael Solomonov.
“He’s like, “Ooh, that’s sick!,” Perry said. He told Solomonov not to share the dispensary on social media, as it wasn’t quite ready for prime time, but it was too late. Solomonov had already posted it to his Instagram.
“He has like 100,000 followers,” Perry said. “Before you know it, there was like a line at the door, in the yard to buy cheese from this machine, and then within like a week, it was all over the press.”
And not just here in Philadelphia. The New York Post covered it. Food & Wine covered it. The Wall Street Journal covered it. All wanted to know about the award-winning cheese coming out of a machine.
An ‘iconic’ part of the neighborhood
Perhaps, Perrystead’s dispensary is unfairly getting more press than the actual delicious cheese inside of it.
Right now the dispensary has their Intergalactic flagship cheese, nigella-seed breakfast cheese called Daybreak, real Philadelphia-made cream cheese, aka the Real Philly Schmear, and more. Perrystead also sells cheese and charcuterie holiday boxes that you can give as a gift.
Perry has always been a lover of food and cooking. Creating quality cheese has been a 20-year journey that began as a hobby in New York and eventually brought him to Philadelphia. He believes in the power of good milk — calling Pennsylvania’s small family dairy farmers “spectacular” and “world class.” His cheese is an homage to them.
“The grass, the rotational grazing, the traditional farming, the breed quality, everything,” he explained. “They just do such good work with the animals and the land, so we really wanted to highlight that, and there’s no better way to highlight that than cheese.”
And residents have come to embrace the novelty of Perry’s idea, even if it didn’t seem so novel at the start.
Leaigha Howard lives nearby in Fishtown. She likes to bring visitors inside to check out the dispensary. Her father, Lander Howard, was in town and had flown in from Georgia.
“I do think it’s a cool initiative in the neighborhood that kind of makes it unique,” Howard said. “I haven’t seen it anywhere else.”
“I didn’t ever hear about the cheese vending machine,” Leander noted. “But I am going to visit it before I leave.”
Resident Kayla Patton also likes to take guests to check out the Perrystead’s dispensary.
“Anytime I take someone through here, I always have to show them the cheese vending machine,” Patton said. “Because I think it’s such an iconic part of this neighborhood that you know, (at) 2 a.m., 4 a.m. you’re craving some cheese, some charcuterie. There’s a vending machine for you.”
