Artemis Provisions and Cheese Opens Retail Space in Mt. Horeb; Restaurant and Butcher Shop Coming Soon
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kingsley and Melissa Gobourne had a problem: 100 chickens in a truck and nowhere to put them.
Artemis Provisions and Cheese was a new business at the time. Kingsley Gobourne had grown up in Blanchardville and was still friends with many of the area’s farmers. He started Artemis to help some of those farmers sell beef and pork when supply chains were shut down, leaving them unable to sell their products. Gobourne used his sales experience to connect local producers with consumers, starting with his co-workers and expanding to online sales. Other farmers began to notice their success.
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“We started recruiting farmers,” Kingsley Gobourne recalled in an interview for the 365 Amplified podcast. “People started coming to us and saying, ‘Hey, if you haul beef, can you haul pork for us or chicken for us?’”
Soon, they received an interesting order: a restaurant needed 100 chickens. The Gobournes worked with several Wisconsin farms, and the harvested birds soon arrived at their Mount Horeb home. Just then, they received bad news: the order had been canceled.
“We sat there for about 30 minutes,” he said. “Hey, we have to unload this stuff, but what are we going to do?”
Anything that didn’t fit in the freezer was brined overnight, and the next day they held a marathon smoke session, cooking up both jerk chicken and regular smoked chicken. They spread the word on social media and started selling.
“People loved it,” Gobourne said. “We actually made more money (cooking) the chicken and selling it at a premium than we did just selling it wholesale by the pound. So we thought, ‘Can we do this more often?'”
Kingsley Gobourne said it was just one example of how the duo turned problems into opportunities. “With every challenge we’ve faced, we’ve had to evolve to meet that opportunity,” he said.
That chicken fiasco sparked Artemis’s arrival as a caterer and vendor at events like pop-ups hosted by the Urban League of Greater Madison and the Madison Black Chamber of Commerce. Success in those spaces led to bigger dreams: a processing plant, a retail space, and maybe even a restaurant.
They were initially looking to rent a small space in Mount Horeb.
“There was a vacant store that was probably 15 x 30. We thought we’d better rent it out, that we’d have this cool little butcher shop, which would be really tiny. But as we started talking about it, we quickly realized that the building had some really unique qualities. We started talking to the landlord, who wanted to move the property and not really continue to rent it out,” Gobourne said. “And we didn’t know what would happen if we just rented it out and then it went to somebody else. So to protect that interest in the opportunity to be on Main Street, we decided to try to acquire the property, with no real resources to do so, other than ambition and big ideas.”
They were able to pull together the resources through Summit Credit Union, TIF financing and state economic development grants. They purchased the property in late 2021 and have spent the intervening time renovating and acquiring needed equipment while continuing to cater weddings and other events, selling local products online and selling at events like this weekend’s Mt. Horeb Art Fair.
They also went directly into farming, renting land outside Mount Horeb to raise their own animals.
It was all a new experience for Melissa Gobourne.
“I grew up in Verona. I had no farming experience,” she said. “It was a learning experience. But I had a lot of fun and really learned to appreciate a lot of things about farming and taking care of animals and then providing great local produce to the local community.”
Their retail space opened two weekends ago, and that small 15-by-30 space they first toured will soon become their restaurant, Taste by Artemis, featuring the Jamaican-American cuisine Kingsley grew up eating at home.
“We’re going to try to really focus on some of those essentials that you’ll find if you travel to Jamaica,” Kingsley said.
The basement will be converted into a meat processing plant and is just waiting for approval from public health inspectors. The Gobournes estimate that about 85 percent of the processing will be direct services to farmers and about 15 percent will end up in the shop.
“We really focus on getting to know our customers and what they like,” said Kingsley Gobourne. The offering includes a variety of cuts of beef, pork and chicken, as well as locally produced sausages, sauces, cheeses, barbecue accessories and more.
Artemis Provisions and Cheese will be open this weekend for the Mount Horeb Art Fair, with lunch options — including a sneak peek at some of the recipes the restaurant will offer when it opens — available on Front Street behind the shop.
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