When dairy farmer Patrick Holden sat down at his kitchen table to read his emails one day in July, he couldn’t believe his luck. A buyer, who claimed to represent a French supermarket chain, wanted to buy 22 tonnes of Hafod, his specialist cheddar.
“It was the biggest order for our cheese we’ve ever received,” he recalls, “and, because it was from France, I thought, ‘finally, people on the continent are appreciating what we do’.”
The order had been made through Neal’s Yard Dairy, an upmarket cheese seller and wholesaler, and the first batch of Hafod arrived at its London base in September. It took up just one square metre on a pallet but represented two years of effort and had a wholesale value of £35,000.
“It’s one of the most special cheeses being made in the UK,” explains Bronwen Percival, a buyer at Neal’s Yard Dairy. Once bound in muslin cloth and sealed with a layer of lard, Hafod is aged for 18 months.
The farm didn’t have enough to fulfil the order, so 20 tonnes of Somerset cheddar was also provided by two other dairy farms to make it up; in all, this was £300,000-worth of some of the most expensive cheese made in the UK.
On 14 October, it was collected from Neal’s Yard’s warehouse by a courier and taken to a depot – and then, mysteriously, it disappeared.
There had, in fact, been no order. It came instead from someone impersonating the supposed buyer.
The theft made global headlines, and was nicknamed “the grate cheese robbery”. British chef Jamie Oliver warned his followers on X: “If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong’uns.”
In late October, a 63-year-old man was arrested in London, then released on bail. And there has been no news since. The 950 truckles of cheese – roughly the weight of four full-sized elephants – have disappeared without a trace.
“It is ridiculous,” says fellow cheesemaker Tom Calver, whose cheddar was part of the stolen consignment. “Out of all the things to steal in the world – 22 tonnes of cheese?”
And yet it isn’t as surprising as it at first seems – for this is far from the first theft of its kind.
Why cheese theft is on the rise
Food-related crimes – which include smuggling, counterfeiting, and out-and-out theft – cost the global food industry between US $30 to 50 billion a year (£23-£38 billion), according to the World Trade Organisation. These range from hijackings of freight lorries delivering food to warehouses to the theft of 24 live lobsters from a storage pen in Scotland.
But a number of these food crimes have also targeted the cheese industry – and in particular luxury cheese.
Last year, in the run-up to Christmas, around £50,000 worth of cheese was stolen from a trailer in a service station on the M5 near Worcester. The problem isn’t a new one – as far back as 1998, thieves broke into a storeroom and took nine tonnes of cheddar from a family-run farm in Somerset.
It’s happening elsewhere in Europe, too: in 2016, criminals made off with £80,000 of Parmigiano Reggiano from a warehouse in northern Italy. This particular type of parmesan, which requires at least a year to mature, is created by following a process that has been in place, with little modification, for almost 1,000 years. At the time of the heist, Italy’s Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium told CBS news that about $7 million (£5.4m) worth of cheese had been stolen in a two-year period.
The problem is only set to rise across the industry as cheese becomes more valuable. The overall price of food and non-alcoholic drinks in the UK rose around 25% between January 2022 and January 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics. Cheese, meanwhile, saw a similar price hike in the space of a single year.
“Cheesemaking is an energy-intensive business,” says Patrick McGuigan, a specialist in the dairy sector. This is because in the production process milk needs to be heated up and, once made, cheese is stored in energy-hungry refrigerators, meaning that fuel prices play a big part in the cost. “And so there was a big price increase following the disruption caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
In 2024, overall food price inflation in the UK has fallen to 1.7 per cent, but less so for cheese. “The retail price of cheddar increased by 6.5 per cent up to May 2024,” adds McGuigan. “This is why we’re seeing security tags on blocks of cheddar in supermarkets. Based on price alone, cheese is one of the most desirable foods a criminal can steal.”
Yet it isn’t the easiest product to shift – particularly farmhouse cheese, most of which tends to be heavy and bulky and must be kept at specific temperatures. As such, transporting it can be a costly, complicated procedure that is beyond most criminals – unless, of course, they are organised.
But the question that remains is who exactly these organised criminals are – and where does the cheese end up?
How organised crime infiltrated the food industry
“There is a long-established connection between food and organised crime,” says Andy Quinn of the National Food Crime Unit (NFCU), which was established in 2015 following the 2013 horse meat scandal. One example of this is the high proportion of illegal drugs smuggled through legal global food supply chains.
In September, dozens of kilograms of cocaine were found in banana deliveries to four stores of a French supermarket, with police unsure who the intended recipient was. For the drugs to reach the end of the food supply chain is highly unusual, but this method of transporting illegal items across borders in containers of food is common.
According to Quinn, once drug cartels and other criminal operators gain a foothold into how a food business operates, they spot other opportunities. “They will infiltrate a legitimate business, take control of its distribution networks and use it to move other illegal items, including stolen food.”
For criminal networks, food has other attractions. “They know crimes involving food result in less severe convictions than for importing drugs,” says Quinn, “but they can still make similar amounts of money.” Particularly if it’s a premium cheese.
The problem for the criminals is what to do with it. “There are few places to offload them,” says Jamie Montgomery, who runs the Somerset farm that was targeted in the 1998 heist. “Shifting that much artisan cheese is difficult.”
This is why people in the industry believe stolen cheese is often sent overseas to countries where there are thriving food black markets – and indeed cheese black markets.