Mooivallei Suiwel is a cheese and butter producer based at Bonnievale, a town in the Breede River Valley in the Western Cape. Its name is Afrikaans for "beautiful valley" and echoes that of the town itself, which combines the Scots word "bonnie" with Vale, the name of the local railway siding. The founding Du Plessis family had been involved in dairying at Bonnievale since the mid-1970s.
Christopher Forrest Rigg and the Breede River canal
Christopher Forrest Rigg (1861-1926) was born in Scotland and settled in the Breede River Valley in 1900, having previously farmed in the interior. He was accompanied by his second wife, Lilian Isabel Elizabeth Moon of the Robertson district, whom he had married in 1894. Two daughters, Mabel and Gladys, had already died in infancy before the move. A third daughter, Mary Myrtle, was born at Bonnievale in 1903.
Rigg bought up portions of the farm Bosjesmansdrift and set about building a canal system fed by the Breede River, including a weir and a blasted irrigation tunnel. Water was carried in suspended wooden channels set on pillars, a design that suffered repeated damage from winter debris. He marketed the resulting irrigation plots to prospective British settlers through a detailed recruitment brochure, presenting the valley as an opportunity for white settlement in the age of empire. The scheme was initially known as Riggton, and as plot sales increased it developed into the town of Bonnievale. In 1910 Rigg handed the tunnel and canal system to the local irrigation board.
Accounts published by the district often describe the valley before 1900 as dry, desolate and dependent on small-scale stock farming. This framing understates a longer history of occupation and land grants in the area, which formed part of the Swellendam district and had been subject to quitrent grants well before Rigg's arrival. Rigg died at sea in November 1926, aged 69, while travelling overseas. The canal remains central to agriculture at Bonnievale.
The Myrtle Rigg Memorial Church
Mary Myrtle Rigg contracted meningitis in 1911 and died at the age of seven. Accounts of her death record that she asked her father to build a church for the town. She was buried in a lucerne field near the family home where she had played, and the site later became the family graveyard.
Rigg built a small Norman-style stone church in her memory near the grave. The cornerstone is dated 1921, although the first Anglican service was only held in 1924. Stone was quarried from a hill roughly 100 metres from the site, the floor was laid in imported Italian marble, and the stained glass came from England. The dome-shaped roof of river stone and cement leaked so badly that it was later covered with a layer of lead. The carved main door was acquired in Zanzibar. The building eventually fell out of regular use as a place of worship and now serves as a museum.
Bonnievale and the dairy industry
Bonnievale relied on goat and then ostrich farming in its early years. After the collapse of the ostrich feather market at the start of the twentieth century, local farmers sought alternative uses for their lucerne fields and existing infrastructure. The Boesmansrivierse Kooperatiewe Kaasfabriek, or Boesmans River Co-operative Cheese Factory, was founded in 1926 with roughly twenty members, serving dairy farmers in the Bonnievale and Swellendam districts and producing only Gouda.
The co-operative expanded during the 1970s, adding Cheddar and a whey powder plant, and its operating company was later listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Through a 1989 amalgamation it became part of the Cape Dairy Co-operative, whose brands included Bonnita. That business was acquired by Parmalat SA in the late 1990s and now trades as Lactalis South Africa. The Bonnievale plant became the largest cheese plant in the country.
Mooivallei and the Rigg's brand
Mooivallei was established in 2000, when a group of local milk producers combined to add value to their milk by making Gouda. Louis du Plessis, who had spent 24 years as manager and later chief executive of the co-operative and its successors, including the listed Bonnita, was a founder alongside those producers. The company later produced HACCP-certified Gouda and Cheddar as well as Jersey butter, and for much of its independent existence operated as a family enterprise with its farmer suppliers as shareholders, Hendrik du Plessis succeeding his father in the running of the business.
Rigg's is Mooivallei's retail and catering brand, named for Christopher Forrest Rigg and his daughter Mary Myrtle, and associated with the stone church built in her memory.
Mooivallei Suiwel was acquired by the Ladismith Cheese Company in August 2021, a transaction in which the Competition Commission recorded financial difficulties at Mooivallei. In November 2025 the Woodlands Dairy Group acquired Ladismith Cheese and its subsidiaries, including Mooivallei Suiwel, from the Sea Harvest Group.
