Cheese Talk with Jane Bowyer

I had always been in the dairy industry, but one thing kept niggling me – Kent, a great dairy county, had no cheesemaking tradition! I sold my business and looked around for a way to change that. Like many others, I had to look further afield for help and inspiration. That’s when I came across a couple wanting to retire and sell their business making Ashmore, a Farmhouse Cheddar-style cheese. It is a good example of the eclectic, free-form way many new cheeses develop in Britain. The original recipe came from a handbook for smallholders published by a Scottish agricultural college. That found its way into the hands of David Doble. He first made it in Kent, then Sussex with his wife Pat, before moving to Ashmore on the Wiltshire/Dorset border. They were willing to sell, but only if I and my team went down to learn how to do the job properly. The advantage of a lack of a cheesemaking history can be a freedom from the hand of tradition.

When we entered the market, the constant reaction from people coming to our stands was, “Just one cheese? Haven’t you got any others?” The demand was for variety, so we supplied it: hard, soft, cow’s, goat’s, and later sheep’s milk cheeses. I would spend five minutes describing my soft cheese, and then they would respond, “Oh, you mean a Camembert?” So, to save everyone’s time, we called them Chaucer’s Camembert and Bowyer’s Brie Recently the PDO for Camembert, which demanded it be made in Normandy from cows in Normandy, was relaxed. Now the milk can come from anywhere in France. The pressure from the multinationals on artisanal cheesemaking in France and other traditional cheese nations gives us room to showcase our products. If France is going to downgrade what Camembert means in France, why shouldn’t we use it to describe our much more strictly defined version here in Kent?

I know we may face harder times selling to mainland Europe, but there are some positive signs out there. Global forces are bound to affect small British cheesemakers. Look at what’s happening on the other side of the world. China, a country that is predominantly lactose intolerant, is now the world’s third largest producer of milk. It has a growing appetite for cheese. Half of New Zealand’s dairy farms are owned by China to feed that appetite. Rising income and a desire for the good things in life are a driving factor in the demand for dairy. India is another of the world’s top milk producers. It too has a rising middle-class and, unlike China, a predominantly milk tolerant population.

When they and the affluent classes in other burgeoning economies go looking for the best cheeses, made with real love and respect for their origin and ingredients, will they turn to Lactalis and the like or to those makers using their local milk to tailor cheeses to their local demands? That, in turn, will affect our home market. When British retailers look abroad for supplies of cheap cheese they will find themselves outbid by larger, richer markets. They will then have to increasingly turn to UK producers. Faced with a choice of expensive mass-produced imports, surely our artisanal cheeses are going to be seen as a good buy? We opened for business in the year the banks crashed us into an international recession. I believe we are responsive enough, and creative enough, to cope with our next set of challenges too.