We’ve all heard of buffalo mozzarella. But in one popular Southeast Asia destination, a farm is offering travelers a chance to sample a wide variety of cheeses using milk from local buffalos instead of cows.
Laos Buffalo Dairy, in the UNESCO-listed heritage town of Luang Prabang, is the country’s first dairy and buffalo farm. And it was actually the byproduct of a midlife crisis.
Australian CEO Susie Martin and her husband, farm GM Steven McWhirter, originally came to Laos from Singapore to run a guest house for a year.
“When we tried to buy buffalo milk to make the delicious yogurt we had seen in Sri Lanka to use at the guesthouse, no one had any idea what we were talking about,” recalls Martin. “Seeing that there was also growing demand from hotels and restaurants for dairy products such as mozzarella, we set up the dairy in 2017.”
Using the logic from her time in commercial real estate, she thought, “If you can rent an office space, you can rent a buffalo.” Thus the social enterprise concept of the dairy was born, and as a sign at the farm says, “This is our midlife crisis with a purpose instead of a Porsche.”
