Robert Kaufelt


Robert “Rob” Ian Kaufelt is the former owner of Murray's Cheese who is credited with turning Murray's into the "Apple store of fromage." In 1991, he bought Murray's Cheese, the oldest cheese shop in New York City, founded by Murray Greenberg.
During his tenure as owner, Kaufelt built Murray's Cheese into a $250 million national enterprise, representing a large share of the $17 billion specialty cheese market. More than once, Murray's Cheese was named one of the best cheese shops in the world.
In addition to the flagship location on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Kaufelt opened a branch in Grand Central Terminal in 2002 and a restaurant, Murray's Cheese Bar, in 2012.
In 2005, Kaufelt entered a partnership with Ohio-based Kroger Company. By 2016, Kaufelt had 350 Murray's Cheese shops.
On January 31, 2017, Kaufelt sold all of Murray's Cheese to Kroger for an undisclosed sum.
Kaufelt also sold the building at 254 Bleecker Street to Kroger for $20.6 million.

Career

Kaufelt came from a family of grocers. His paternal grandfather, Irving, was a Polish immigrant who opened Kaufelt Brothers Fancy Groceries in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1920. Rob's father, Stanley P. Kaufelt, owned Mayfair Supermarkets Inc., which operated a chain of 28 groceries trading under the banner of Foodtown. In 1995, Stanley Kaufelt sold Mayfair Supermarkets to the Dutch supermarket company Ahold.
Rob joined Mayfair after graduating from Cornell University in 1969 and eventually became president. He left Mayfair in 1985 to open two specialty stores in Princeton and Summit, NJ, called Kaufelt's Fancy Groceries. When the Princeton shop failed in 1987, Kaufelt sold the Summit location and moved to Greenwich Village.
After buying Murray's Cheese in 1991, he added temperature-controlled aging caves in the basement. Kaufelt opened a classroom to instruct professionals and the public in cheese and cheese pairings, including a 3-day Cheese U Boot Camp. Nationally, Kaufelt developed the Murray's Certified Cheese Professional program, which brought cheese in line with other professional food credentials, such as pastry chefs and sommeliers. Students must pass a rigorous test from the American Cheese Society, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1983 to support the North American artisanal and specialty cheese industry. More than 5,000 attendees have completed the training; hundreds of Murray's Cheese staff in New York and in Kroger supermarkets are certified cheese professionals.
According to Edible Manhattan, Murray's was “a launchpad for many of the most important businesses in the current good food movement.”

Publications

The Murray's Cheese Handbook Broadway Books
In 2010, Kaufelt married Nina Planck, a Virginia-born food writer and farmers’ market entrepreneur. The couple lives in New York City and in Stockton, NJ, with their children: Julian, born October 24, 2006, and twins Jacob and Rose, born August 4, 2009.
Planck wrote The Real Food Cookbook: Traditional Dishes for Modern Cooks Bloomsbury; The Farmers’ Market Cookbook Hodder and Stoughton; Real Food: What to Eat and Why Bloomsbury; and Real Food for Mother and Baby Bloomsbury.
Kaufelt's previous two marriages, to Pamela Copeland and Patricia Fox, ended in divorce. A previous relationship, with the Anglo-Irish food writer Tamasin Day-Lewis, was chronicled by Day-Lewis in Where Shall We Go for Dinner?