There are those who swear by cheese, and there are those who steal it. London’s cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy has reported the theft of £300,000 worth of award-winning cheddar cheese.
Euro News quoted the dairy as complaining that a con artist posing as a wholesale distributor for a major French retailer, had made off with 22 metric tons of cheddar.
Three varieties of the cloth-wrapped cheese are missing.
“The high monetary value of these cheeses likely made them a particular target for the thieves,” Neal’s Yard Dairy, a distributor, wholesaler, and retailer of British artisanal cheese, said in a statement.
One of the suppliers told the BBC that the cheddar stolen from the dairy may have already been shipped abroad to be sold.
Detectives at Scotland Yard and international authorities are searching for the culprits.
The cheese was aged 12-18 months and a lot of work went into making it. Some suspect a “sophisticated” operation of this kind means the cheese could be gracing tables in Russia or the Middle East.
Neal’s Yard dairy has reached out to international cheese sellers and has alerted them about the situation and to be on the lookout for the stolen cheese, particularly in 10-kilogram and 24-kilogram blocks.
In a desperate bid to solve the case of the stolen cheddar, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has turned to social media. He urged his 10.5 million social media followers to help solve the mystery. Calling it the “grate cheese robbery,” Oliver told his fans to be on the lookout for “lorry loads of very posh cheese.”
As he put it, “If the deal seems too gouda to be true, it probably is! Let’s find these cheese stealers.”
