“I signed up for origami class, but it folded…”

Town Crier with

Justin Tunstall

Retail consultant, shares with us his cheese selling experience

• “Sticky fingers”
• “Everyone’s a winner”
• “Myths and legends of Turophilia”
• “When ‘cheese’ is not cheese”
• “Don’t disrespect the Cheddar”

Last week I did two things out of character: I bought cheese from a supermarket, and I watched a ‘RomCom’. I won’t name the shop; the film was Love Actually

I was struck by the scene in which a hapless adulterer, played by the much-mourned Alan Rickman, is almost caught red-handed by his wife while buying jewellery for his mistress. Rowan Atkinson plays the obsequious shop assistant who insists on gift-wrapping the purchase in a toe-curling lengthy process as Emma Thompson (the wife) gets ever nearer to the counter.

On my first day at a cheese counter I took ages wrapping each purchase – not that I was trying to present ornate or precise packaging, but because I was cack-handed, unfamiliar with the curious mixture of spatial awareness and dexterity that is developed by seasoned cheese wrappers. In time, thankfully, I was able to take pride in wrapping cheese of varying sizes and shapes in a manner that was swift, secure and attractive. I always aim to wrap with sufficient (but not too much) paper, draw together the tuned-in corners and anchor them with a single seal from our labelling machine. Needing to use additional Sellotape always feels like failure. My efforts might not deliver the high theatre of Rowan Atkinson’s clerk, but many customers complimented me on my skills and seemed to enjoy watching me.

My experience at the supermarket was an eye-opener. The store in question has three areas for cheese: standard pre-packaged cheese on the shelves, a staffed deli counter and a half-way stage – a chiller stocked with cheese pre-cut and wrapped in-store at the deli counter, but ready for shoppers to pluck as they dashed past. While the cheese I bought from it was disappointingly bland, I was quietly impressed by the presentation. Although wrapped in cling film, there was no excess lump of folded film and the labels were positioned neatly and symmetrically.

The following day I was yearning for some real flavour, so I detoured to a specialist cheese shop for some Montgomery’s unpasteurised Cheddar. A ready-cut chunk looked about the 250g size I wanted and I asked to buy it. After weighing, the cling film-covered cheese was popped into an opaque white flimsy plastic bag, the top of that run through an automatic sticky tape sealer and presented to me with a request for the £6 or so that it cost.

I felt let down. The cheese was great, but would have been far better served by a paper wrap, rather than the excess of plastic to which it had been consigned. Further to that indignity, my piece of cheese also suffered from an unsightly crescent cut (which happens sometimes when cutting through an acute corner), which I would always have trimmed before offering for sale. Finally, there was no labelling of my selection. Knowing the name and source of the cheese one has selected after a tasting spree is not only good for customer education, it also encourages repeat purchases.

At over £20 a kilo, I was spending at least double the price of the supermarket’s Cheddar, but the presentation was worse. Premium food retailing requires more than just knowledge and range – we must also look to quality of packaging, presentation and perhaps even that sense of theatre if we are to help reinforce our customers’ decisions to spend more with us than they would at a multiple.