An interview with Bronwen Percival from Neal’s Yard Dairy

Bronwen Percival is the Buyer and Technical Director at Neal’s Yard Dairy. She’s been engaged with artisan cheese since she started as a cheesemonger at the Dairy. Not a native to the UK, she grew up in San Diego, California, where her grandfather was a dairy producer. She works with over 40 cheese producers across the UK and Ireland and has co-authored ‘Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes and the Fight for Real Cheese’ with her husband Francis Percival.

SFT: Many people are aware of the leadership that Neal’s Yard Dairy (NYD) have shown not only in convening the artisan cheese making community of the UK but also in developing markets for named artisan cheeses based on the story behind their production – not just in the UK but throughout the world. What are the motivations that inspire you and your team to do this work?

Bronwen Percival: I think there are a number of different ways to answer this question, because we all have many, many motivations. The whole idea of connecting a name and a story to a cheese as it gets to the market, is quite transformative for British cheese. In some ways it’s antithetical to commodity production which is all about taking interchangeable raw materials and turning them into interchangeable non-differentiated cheese – along that path, a lot of those farmhouse cheeses lose the identity that is associated with the producer.

It’s not enough to just sell cheese; what’s really important is to sell that cheese connected to an individual identity that meets the market and where excellent quality is therefore rewarded because people will come back and ask not for Neal’s Yard Dairy cheddar but for Hafod cheddar or Montgomery’s cheddar. That was pretty radical in the late 1970s and early 80s when Neal’s Yard Dairy got started in Covent Garden. It’s less radical today, but I still feel it’s fundamental to what we do. We’re the bridge between the individual small producers and the market and we are tasting every batch and talking to customers about how each batch is different and trying to match the right cheese to the right customer. It’s that simple.

There’s also another way to answer that question, which is that diversity is an important thing. We talk about the importance of diversity in a field with different types of plants or the diversity of the genomes of the cows that [make our cheeses], but we live in a world of rapidly reducing diversity and the same applies to the market. Losing that diversity, as businesses scale up and we get fewer options, is a real risk to our food system and it’s a risk to taste and flavour as well.

So, the work that we do is really about protecting that diversity. Championing that within the market sometimes means selling tiny amounts of cheeses that are made in [small-scale] production. I don’t know how financially viable that is, because, at the end of the day, they’re only a minute fraction of what we do, but it’s still a really important part of our mission and it’s what will set us apart.

“We’re the bridge between the individual small producers and the market and we are tasting every batch and talking to customers about how each batch is different and trying to match the right cheese to the right customer. It’s that simple.”

SFT: We know that your operation includes retail, wholesale and export, but what is the ratio of sales in each area and which countries buy cheeses from NYD? 

BP: That’s a very good question! It’s split – about 25% of our sales are through our retail shops in London. We have three shops and another one possibly on its way and we have an ecommerce department, which is a form of retail as well. Fifty percent of our sales go through our domestic wholesale to shops and restaurants all over the UK, and the final 25% is on export. That’s as a percentage of the volume of the cheese.

Which countries buy cheese from NYD? We ship cheese all over the world. We sell cheese to the US, throughout Europe, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and some goes to Peru and Japan. It’s kind of an eclectic mixture.

But when people flippantly say, ‘oh, we’ll find other markets abroad’, I think they are forgetting that [continental] Europe is an incredibly sophisticated market when it comes to cheese consumption. People eat cheese seriously, more seriously than we do here in the UK.

Bronwen takes notes during a selection visit to Montgomery’s Cheese, one of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s cheesemakers who produce Montgomery’s Cheddar

SFT: What are the key motivations of the customers who buy your cheeses? It is clearly taste and provenance but are there other drivers?

BP: I would say that each customer brings their own set of values and interests to the transaction. One of the skills of the monger in the shop is to be able to identify what’s driving somebody to be interested in our cheese, even if they might not necessarily be able to articulate it themselves. Taste is one of the big things in our shops and we encourage our wholesale customers to set up systems where people can taste the cheese they are going to buy – before they actually buy it. It means that they are going to go home with the cheese that they like the best, but it also means that they’re making their buying decisions holistically, not just by the price, not just by the label. Really, it’s about what’s delighting them. We don’t apply different margins to different cheeses in our shop, so, hopefully, people – even if they like the more expensive cheese – can buy a small piece if their budget is limited. I think that’s really critical.

“Each customer brings their own set of values and interests to the transaction. One of the skills of the monger in the shop is to be able to identify what’s driving somebody to be interested in our cheese, even if they might not necessarily be able to articulate it themselves.”

A counter full of cheese at the Neal’s Yard Dairy shop in Bermondsey, London. The selection of cheese changes week to week; on display in this photo, from left to right, is Harbourne Blue, Pevensey Blue and Ragstone

SFT: You have recently undertaken a pilot with the SFT’s Global Farm Metric. What motivated you to do this?

BP: This goes back to the last question about the diversity of farming systems that are being used by the suppliers of our cheeses. We were acutely aware that we’re not farmers and we don’t have the capacity to make minute judgements about the environmental impacts of different farming systems, even though we visit the suppliers that we buy cheese from all the time.

We don’t have all of the data in front of us and we don’t have the eye to necessarily see what’s important and separate it from what’s just visually apparent. We thought it would be really interesting for the people who are farmhouse cheese makers and are making the milk as well as the cheese, to participate in the Global Farm Metric (GFM) trial, for a number of different reasons.

First, to get a better sense of the diversity of the farming systems and how they measure up next to one another, [but also] so that we could help people to understand what the opportunities and risks within their own systems are, encouraging their own path towards progress in whatever form it takes. Clearly there are customers who are interested in this, and, if we had the data to back it up, it would be great to do some experiments, perhaps putting filters on our ecommerce platform on the website. So, if people wanted to buy cheese that comes from a high biodiversity system, you hit the filter and 10 cheeses come up that have actually demonstrated that they are excelling in this area. There are some exciting opportunities around that, but first we need the data to get started.

SFT: How many of your cheese makers are participants in the GFM trials?

BP: We invited all 25 of the farmhouse cheese makers that we work with and about 20 of them signed up. We’re right in the middle of the trial now, so obviously it’s a big ask to get people to spend 4-6 hours completing forms online when they are busy running a farm. It’s hard to carve out extra time when you’re exhausted at the end of a long day. It will be really fascinating to see how many of our cheese makers complete the process and the feedback that they give to the GFM team – I think one of the outputs of this is to actually help the GFM team make their metric better and easier to use and more relevant, and to make sure that the information is actually good for farmers. It’s a two-way process.

Another one of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s cheesemakers, Curlew Dairy in Yorkshire, where Ben and Sam Spence make Yoredale Wensleydale

SFT: The best cheese making represents a combination of the quality of the raw milk and the art and science of the cheese maker. What would you say is the right balance of these two features for the best artisan cheeses?

BP: Such an interesting question – is it the milk or is it the making? Is it the nature or the nurture? They’re both really important. Right now, we have a collection of cheeses where the farming is really excellent and maybe the cheese making leaves something to be desired; and on the other hand, we have a collection of cheeses where maybe the farming is a little bit more intensive and a little more conventional but the cheese making is superlative. It’s been really amazing to me how you can, in general, with some exceptions, really taste the quality of the raw milk in the finished cheese, even when the cheese making isn’t great.

On the flip side, there’s a lot to be said that with amazing cheese making you can actually bring a lot of quality, character and interest to very boring milk. Really, what we’re aiming for is to help both of those parties to discover the missing half. I can’t point to very many places where they’ve got everything.

“Is it the milk or is it the making? Is it the nature or the nurture? They’re both really important.”

SFT: Have you had any feedback about the interest of your customers in knowing more about the story behind their cheese?

BP: This is one of the reasons that we’re so interested in participating in the Global Farm Metric trial. We’re going to have some data from the trials, and we can then test a hypothesis. I couldn’t tell you with any certainty what the most important factors are to our customers – it may be that there are different groups of customers who would rank them completely differently from one another. By making that information more readily accessible, either on our website or on the labels in our shops or by being able to train our team to talk about them more fluently, we’re going to find out a lot more and we’re going to be better at hooking up the right customer with the right cheese for them.

Check back in a year or two when we’ve completed the trial and put some of the stuff to the test and we’ll see if we can identify what the main drivers are for people who care about the provenance of their cheese. If there’s good data that shows people are making buying decisions according to the provenance of the cheeses, that’s a much more powerful agent for change.

Photos courtesy of Neal’s Yard Dairy.