The Story of the Name & Logo

Folks often ask: how did you come up with the name Bleating Heart®? Well....cows moo, goats and sheep bleat. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

bleat : to make the natural cry of a sheep or goat

It is a pun, a play on the term "bleeding heart" which is defined as "a person who shows extravagant sympathy especially for an object of alleged persecution." We certainly have extravagant sympathy for American food artisans, but mainly we just thought this name was funny. After all, our motto is making seriously good cheese without taking ourselves too seriously. All of our cheese names are conceived with that same spirit. Our basic rule is that if a name isn't sort of funny, we're not using it.

From the start, we chose to break from convention and not use our own given names, or the names of places within our region to identify our cheeses. This does not diminish the quality of our cheese, or the profound respect we have for the dairy farmers who work so diligently every day to produce the milk to goes into our cheeses, nor does it mean we don't take immense pride in our region. We just decided to take a non-traditional, more humorous approach. It's actually no different than how most craft brewers name their beers (and we are BIG fans of craft beer).

We also get questions about our logo, because it is not your typical cheese brand logo. That was also on purpose. The heart is obvious - the name is Bleating Heart®. Our tagline of handcrafted with whimsy™ conveys the fun and whimsical spirit driving everything we do. In keeping with the handcrafted, unpretentious, whimsical nature of Bleating Heart cheese, we opted for a font that looks handwritten. We wanted to get as far away from elegant and fancy as possible.

As for the sheep in the logo, Seana met her in France in 2009. This is a real life sheep - not a drawing - who approached Seana while visiting a cheesemaker in the French Pyrenees mountains. This particular ewe was quite curious about Seana and her friend Minan who were engaged in cheese travel adventures at the time. This sheep approached Seana to say hello and then turned to Minan and heartily bleated at her just as the photo was being taken - a mid-bleat shot. Here is the original sequence as it happened in the barn in France: