Bumthang Swiss Cheese Factory

The Swiss cheese factory in Chamkhar is a small dairy making Gouda and Emmental, started in the 1960s by a Swiss cheesemaker who came to Bumthang on a development programme and never went home. It is next door to the Red Panda brewery and run by the same family — one stop, not two. Allow 20–30 minutes. Ask us whether it is open.

Why there is Swiss cheese in central Bhutan

Fritz Maurer arrived in Bhutan in the early 1960s, a trained cheesemaker sent to help introduce dairy processing to a country with a great many cows and no cheese tradition to speak of. He set up a small production in Bumthang — Emmental and Gouda — with backing from HELVETAS, the Swiss development organisation.

He stayed. The Fourth King later gave him the title Dasho, and the dairy is run today by his family, who also run the brewery beside it.

Bumthang is dairy country — cold, high, grassy, and by Bhutanese standards unusually suited to cows rather than rice — so the cheese is not an oddity dropped into the wrong place. It is the obvious thing to make here, and it took an outsider to say so.

What a visit is

A shop. That is the honest description, and it is the one our page has always given. There is a shop beside the factory selling cheese, beer, honey and other local produce, and it is the best place in Bumthang to buy something made in Bumthang.

Whether you can see the production floor is not published anywhere. Ask us and we will check. This is a working small business, not a visitor attraction with a schedule, and the same goes for the opening hours — nobody publishes those either.

How it fits your day

Twenty minutes in Chamkhar, near Bathpalathang Airport — so it slots naturally into the end of a Choekor valley morning, or into the hour before a flight. Take the brewery in the same stop.

See things to do in Bumthang for how it compares with everything else in the district.