Fundo Playa Venado

When asked how do you eat manjar, Fundo Playa Venado sales manager Isabel Margarita chuckled.

- Mary Katherine Gwynn

“If you are Chilean, with everything,” she said. Whether smeared on a stack of pancakes or eaten on its own, manjar is a sweet taste of childhood, especially if you grew up in southern Chile, where grandma likely made manjar for the family.

Intentionally preserving manjar’s familial roots, Fundo Playa Venado, run by Ignacio Álvarez and his wife Ingrid Vandeputte, was founded in 2011 and has three tenants of operation: milk production, cheese and manjar processing. It is also part agrotourism, welcoming families, friends and special groups out to the lush countryside to learn about sustainable dairy farm practices. “[We do this] so that kids understand that milk doesn’t come from the supermarket,” said Álvarez. “I think there is a need to reintroduce the urban world to the rural.”