Specialty cheese shop in Sarasota closing after 14 years

A specialty cheese shop in Sarasota’s Rosemary District is closing. Artisan Cheese Company will close its doors at 550 Central Ave. for the last time Wednesday. The store has been open for 14.5 years — including a recent period where it ran a public crowdfunding campaign to survive. 

The shop is hosting what owner Louise Converse calls a “yard sale” with items from perishables to forks and plates on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Converse cites a multitude of factors in deciding to shutter, including declining sales.

“This year we were down 40%,” Converse wrote on the Artisan Cheese Company Facebook page, with summer sales “staggeringly lower” than that.

"I got over-leveraged with trying to keep the shop open through covid, and then in the years that followed it all snowballed," Converse wrote, announcing the store’s closure on social media. "It’s impossible."

In May 2025, the cheese shop nearly closed due to the inability to keep up with bills, before an angel investor stepped in, supplemented by a GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $50,000.

Despite the capital infusion last year, the shop has faced continued difficulties, including an inability to pay rent, according to Converse.

In the past two months, she wrote, she found two people to take over the shop. 

“But sadly the space will end up going to a restaurant, as the restaurant won the landlord’s approval over the cheese shop, as is their prerogative, as I am in rent arrears,” Converse wrote.

Artisan Cheese Company's staff will be on hand to say goodbye at the yard sale Tuesday and Wednesday, which Converse says will feature any remaining inventory and pantry items.

"The outpouring of love has been pretty overwhelming," Converse says in a video announcing the yard sale. She specifically thanked Sarasota residents and snowbirds, the cheese and bread communities and those in the hospitality and food industries.

In her social media posts, Converse echoed a message she issued last year, in an interview with the Business Observer — that visiting small businesses is the way to keep them around.

"If you have an independent cheese shop near you, go,” Converse wrote. “Embrace cheese as an ingredient. Let the cheesemongers tell you the stories of the cheeses in their cases. Fall in love with them, [and] go back.”