Cheese Board Collective
worker cooperative in Berkeley, California, United States
The Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley, California, comprises two worker-owned-and-operated businesses: a cheese shop/bakery commonly referred to as "The Cheese Board" and a pizzeria known as "Cheese Board Pizza". Along with Peet's Coffee, the Cheese Board is known for its role in starting the North Shattuck neighborhood of Berkeley on its way to becoming famous as a culinary destination: the "Gourmet Ghetto". The bakery brought the French baguette into vogue for Berkeley consumers, and helped spark a revolution in artisan bread.
The Cheese Board is located at 1504 Shattuck Avenue and Cheese Board Pizza is located two doors down the street at 1512 Shattuck Avenue. In 2003, the Cheese Board Collective put together a cookbook, The Cheese Board: Collective Works.
History
Founding and collectivization
The Cheese Board was founded in 1967 as a European-inspired cheese shop by the married couple of Elizabeth Magarian Valoma and Sahag Avedisian in a small storefront at 2114 Vine Street in Berkeley. In 1971, the owners converted their business from a conventional privately owned firm to an egalitarian worker-owned collective by distributing shares in the business equally between themselves and their six employees and equalizing the wages of all of the new worker/owners. The collective have annual beach parties and New Year's celebrations and own land in Mendocino County on which they built a cabin.
Bread
By 1975, the Cheese Board began to experiment with baking bread, originally in small quantities as an informal, impromptu sideline to cheese. The bread sales marked a shift from a purely mercantile business model of buying and selling cheese to a mixed model that combines on-site, artisanal hand-production with domestic and import retail.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5089378. VIAF identifies the subject as 151467568. The Library of Congress control number is n2003001853. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1504, 1512, 2003 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cheese Board Collective” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.