Meet Joey Vosters: Nordic practice director, cheese carver

Anyone who has worked in health IT has probably found themselves in a difficult spot that requires creative thinking and a lot of careful planning. Nordic Practice Director Joey Vosters knows the feeling.

“The first weekend in June, I’ll always be on a stage with a 45-pound block of cheese trying to figure out how I’m going to do this again,” Vosters said.

bridge

Vosters, a Wisconsin native who lives in Appleton, is, of course, preparing for the Great Wisconsin Cheese Festival in Little Chute, Wis. For more than 20 years, that has been where you can find him taking part in the annual cheese carving demonstration.

It began when he was five years old at a 4-H booth during one of the first years of the festival. The organizers were brainstorming ideas for events to attract interest and came to the logical conclusion of equipping children with carving tools and giant blocks of cheese.

“In the beginning, it started off as really simple things,” Vosters said. “I think if I looked back there’s probably pictures of me carving something like the trace of an ice cream cone or an American flag or something really simple.”

Like the coagulated dairy product for which the festival is named, the carvers themselves have become better with age. Vosters has carved a bridge and a cheesehead made of actual cheese. He has also represented Wisconsin’s reputation well by carving a beer stein out of cheese. Last year Vosters carved an impressive likeness of the snowman Olaf from the movie "Frozen."

Olaf

A few years into the competition, it became clear that one carver stood out above the rest. Troy Landwher, who was in Vosters’ 4-H group, went on to attend art school and soon separated himself from the rest of the field.

“In the first few years it was a competition,” Vosters said. “Then everyone quickly realized that Troy was always going to win, so it’s just been a demonstration for a long time now.”

Amazingly, Landwher has turned his skill into an international sensation. His work has been featured on "The Late Show with David Letterman" and the morning shows on all the major networks. In fact, he was commissioned to carve a giant rat for a Year of the Rat celebration in Hong Kong, and Disney flew him to Hollywood and London to carve 400-pound and 200-pound cheese sculptures of the main character from "Ratatouille" for the movie’s DVD releases.

While he may share a stage with the Michelangelo of cheddar, Vosters is modest about his skill, which he doesn’t show off very often.

“Troy’s been to China to carve a giant rat,” Vosters said. “He’s been all over with it, and I just do it once a year. It’s the one artistic thing I do.”

However, this year he was able to put his creative skills to use  for another event when he volunteered to create a sculpture to display at Nordic's annual open house at the home office in Madison, the capital city of America’s Dairyland.

Open House Cheese Sculpture.jpg

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Topics: events, Culture

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