Our shop on Shorts Gardens, Covent Garden, London
Our mission can be summed up in three words: improve British cheese.
Neal’s Yard Dairy’s immediate focus is, of course, on supplying our customers with the cheeses we like best. But our wider aim is to play a role, however small, in reshaping the landscape of British cheesemaking.
IMPROVING BRITISH CHEESE
SUPPORTING A COMMUNITY
CONTINUOUS LEARNING
Our mission is to improve British cheese.
It’s what we are here for.
When Neal's Yard Dairy was first finding its feet in the early 1980s, British farmhouse cheese was in a state of seemingly terminal decline, as the industrialisation of cheesemaking and the supermarkets’ preference for cheapness, uniformity and unchallenging flavours put at risk the very survival of some of the country’s historic territorial cheeses. Things have improved in the intervening years, thanks in no small part to the efforts of our founder, Randolph Hodgson, but while the market for exceptional farmhouse cheese is growing, it remains both small and vulnerable.
Randolph on an early 'Northern Run', a practice we still do today where we visit our suppliers in the north of England to taste and select cheeses we will then sell.
Our role is to support a community of cheesemakers by selecting, maturing and selling their cheeses, and providing our customers with accurate information about them. We provide feedback and advice. We seek out talent, encouraging young cheesemakers to see a viable future in this most traditional of crafts. We provide training and opportunities to people who want to learn the art of selecting, maturing and selling cheese, many of whom will go on to use those skills elsewhere.
In our shops, our cheesemongers share their enthusiasm and knowledge with customers and make them part of the conversation. Every person who enjoys our cheese and understands what makes it different is another person who will demand more than the bland uniformity of the supermarket chiller cabinet.
This is a mission that will never be fully accomplished. Today we have a range of cheeses we are extremely proud of, made by people we know and trust, but we can always do more. We are constantly learning how to nurture the deeply complex flavours that characterise our cheeses. The more we learn about the cheeses, about the people who make them and the people who buy them, the more scope there is to challenge, to explore and to improve.
Cheese maturing on the shelves at our site in Bermondsey, London.
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