Neal's Yard Dairy

We buy cheese from about seventy cheesemakers from farms around Britain and Ireland. We sell this cheese in our two shops in London and to shops and restaurants all over the world. Our main aim is to keep in close contact with the cheesemakers and customers and above all to be in very close contact with all the cheese passing through our hands. We visit some cheesemakers very often; Bronwen, our cheese buyer and Jason, our sales director, select our Cheddars by visiting the West Country every eight weeks and tasting through young cheese to be matured further before sale. Besides allowing us to secure the best cheeses available, these visits also provide an opportunity for us to share information with the cheesemakers about how their cheeses are being received by our customers. Many of the cheeses we buy are either matured on the farm or in our own maturing rooms in Bermondsey, which are in brick railway arches under the main line from London Bridge to Dover. The insulation provided by the venerable Victorian brickwork helps us maintain good conditions for the cheese: humid and cool. A team of five take care of the cheese, turning them and sometimes brushing or washing them until they ripen. We choose the cheese for our shops from the arches in Bermondsey where they are stored to mature. This is how we keep in touch with all the variations which are a wonderful feature of farm cheese and also how we bring the best cheese that we can find back to our shop counters.

In 1979 on July 4th, Neal’s Yard Dairy opened selling Greek Style Yoghurts, Crème Fraiche and fresh cheeses. One of the cheesemakers was a youthful Randolph Hodgson, fresh from his food science degree, uninspired by the career route most food scientists were taking and looking for a job to tide him over until he worked out what he wanted to do. Luckily he found making and selling cheese fascinating and a couple of years later, Nick Saunders asked him to take over and become owner of the Dairy. Even before owning the Dairy, Randolph had started buying cheese to supplement the ones they made on site and initially he did what everyone else did and went to a wholesaler. The cheeses that arrived were fairly anonymous and compared to the detailed knowledge Randolph had of his own cheese, he knew very little about their provenance or why they might taste different from one delivery to the next. The way Randolph sold his cheeses (and what’s become the basis of how we sell today) was by tast