Founder of Formaje, lover of design and art and now also a writer, what can you tell us about your new book?

This is a book of short stories that together provide a broad vision of the universe of artisan cheese. They are a mix of stories about cheese and personal reflections and points of view, which sometimes involve my own story. With this book, what I’ve tried to do is to put onto paper the sensitivity and implicit romanticism that exists in this product which has so much to do with the region, the land, the animals, the artisan trades. I’ve also tried to incorporate many ideas that seek to find common ground between process that happen in cheese and human experiences: cheese, which evolves and changes through fermentation, a process that oscillates between reinvention and decomposition. I’ve drawn on this thread to make comparisons, since I think that humans can extract learning and hope, learn from change, from this process that occurs in the raw material.

On the other hand, the book includes pictures taken by my father, photographer Justino Diez. For me, it was really important that the book, which is definitely a book that’s meant to be read, should be visually supported by images that portray some of the things that I tell in the book, which make it a picture book with images that are supported by the text.

What is the evolution of Formaje or the main values that define you?

The formula for growth that we’re after, based on establishing a highly trained team that lays the foundations for growth, because we’ve been committed to a qualitative and distinctive shopping experience from the start, since retail (the exchange that happens in physical spaces) is at the heart of our project and is something that we want to really take care of, something whose success and growth is based on having an engaged team at a time when shopping is more impersonal than ever before.

Even though artisan cheese is the clear focus on Formaje, the search for excellence is also paired by a highly curated image of the product. How can you explain this to us?

For us, using a fresh, attractive visual language — often on par with fashion — to reach a customer who didn’t necessarily have a prior interest in cheese, but who nevertheless find the way we chose to communicate the subject attractive, since it serves a gateway to a broad audience. We’ve always wanted to make cheese a link that connects the customer more to nature, to the region, to the rural environment and to the life and activities that happen there and which are the foundations of culture, they always have been… and yet those of us in the cities often forget it.