Angelo & Franco
Mid — retail distribution through Costco, Whole Foods, Vons, Albertsons, Pavilions plus restaurant distribution from LA to San Diego.
Hawthorne, Los Angeles County, California, USA
angeloandfranco.com ↗verification source ↗
Quality assessment
A real named artisan cheesemaker, not a farm: Angelo Tartaglia and Franco Russo, from Bagnoli Irpino in southern Italy, making fresh mozzarella-family cheeses in Hawthorne CA since 2009. Burrata is made with cream produced in-house, from California milk received daily. Named makers, daily fresh production and an in-house cream step are genuinely above commodity burrata. It is not a farm and does not own a herd — milk comes from California Dairies, a large cooperative — so the provenance stops at 'California milk'.
- Scale
- Mid — retail distribution through Costco, Whole Foods, Vons, Albertsons, Pavilions plus restaurant distribution from LA to San Diego.
- Feed & inputs
- Not applicable/unknown — milk sourced from California Dairies cooperative.
- Animal welfare
- Determined by the supplying dairies, not by the cheesemaker. Unknown.
- Environmental
- Nothing located.
- Transparency
- Medium — makers and process are public; the milk is cooperative-pooled, so herd-level provenance is not available. One retail line is listed as organic burrata; certificate not located.
Caveats
CATEGORY CORRECTION: this is a CHEESEMAKER, not a farm — the existing row is products=['burrata','mozzarella'] which is right, but do not score it as a farm claim. La Strega's 'Angelo Franco burrata bread-service add-on' is an honest maker credit. Wide grocery availability (Costco) means naming it signals a good default, not exclusivity.
Italian-immigrant-founded cheese brand (Angelo Tartaglia and Franco Russo) making burrata and mozzarella in California; sold via retail/wholesale, no standalone brand website found.
Products
burratamozzarellascamorzaricottabocconcini
Practices
handcrafted, traditional method
Served at
Sources
What the quality assessment above is built on.
- angeloandfranco.com ↗
Founders Angelo Tartaglia and Franco Russo, from Bagnoli Irpino; company story
- foodgps.com ↗
Started making cheese locally in 2009 near Hawthorne Municipal Airport; product range
- cheesetrail.org ↗
Organic burrata line listed; burrata made with in-house cream from locally sourced California milk