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Olivia Potts | Longreads | May 28, 2026 | 4,872 words (17 minutes)
For a cheese lover, Neal’s Yard may be heaven on earth. Enter the Covent Garden branch through its distinctively inky blue front, and you can be in no doubt as to what awaits. An enormous picture-frame window shows off at least a dozen truckles and wheels of cheese. Inside, low-hanging orb lamps glow softly, illuminating the startling array. Huge wheels of Stichelton and Stilton stand stacked on top of one another, their steel-blue veins facing out. Baron Bigod—the British Brie de Meaux (and, whisper it, better than the French equivalent)—oozes suggestively. Yorkshire Pecorino gleams pale, smooth, and yogurty. Wrinkly little Yr Afr, a raw-milk goat’s cheese, fresh from the foothills of Snowdonia, sits alongside bright orange pucks of Yarlington, its cider-washed rind sticky to the touch. Neat writing on large and small blackboards displays the cheese names, origins, and prices.
Randolph Hodgson, a food scientist, and Nicholas Saunders, an activist and entrepreneur, founded the Neal’s Yard dairy in 1979. In the earliest of days, it just produced Greek yogurt, the only thing they’d truly gotten the hang of. British cheese wasn’t really known in the UK, let alone on the world stage, and raw-milk cheeses were viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism—not least by those in charge of environmental health. But Neal’s Yard persevered.
Now there are five brick-and-mortar stores, each nestled in a different buzzy, food-loving part of London. Underneath the railway arches in Bermondsey, the cheeses of Neal’s Yard sit maturing in a beloved institution that has nurtured, connected, championed, educated, and sold around 550 tons of British cheese a year in every corner of the cheese world.
So it wasn’t beyond the realms of belief when a big, fat order came in for artisanal cheddar in 2024. A French supermarket wanted to purchase 950 truckles of the stuff, an order worth around $400,000. Three different dairies were called upon to help fulfil the massive request: Westcombe Dairy, making their eponymous cheddar in Somerset; the Trethowan Brothers, making Pitchfork Cheddar, also in Somerset; and Holden Farm Dairy, making Hafod Cheddar in West Wales. “British cheese has had a massive revival over the past 30 years, but unfortunately, it does feel like that has plateaued off a little bit,” Tom Calver, head cheesemaker at Westcombe Dairy, says. “To keep going, keep surviving, all throughout the whole chain, when an offer like that comes on, you jump on it.”
Twenty-two tons of artisanal British cheese, some of the most expensive cheese made in the UK. A huge order for Neal’s Yard. It seemed too good to be true.
Food fraud is big business. People have been adulterating and stealing food for as long as we’ve been eating it—from smuggling to counterfeiting, hijacking lorries to run-of-the-mill theft. The World Trade Organization estimates that food crime costs the global food industry as much as $50 billion US a year.
Famously, in 2012, around $18 million worth of maple syrup was siphoned from a warehouse in Canada. The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers discovered during a routine check that their maple syrup barrels were depleted, throwing the global supply into jeopardy. In 2013, it was Nutella’s turn, with thieves in Germany stealing 6,875 large jars of the stuff. That same year, while a lorry driver was asleep in his cab in a layby in Worcestershire, England, thieves cut a hole in the side of the lorry and extracted 6,400 tins of Heinz baked beans with sausages. West Mercia police asked for information “about anyone trying to sell large quantities of Heinz baked beans in suspicious circumstances.”
In 2023, in Shropshire, Joby Pool hitched a trailer containing 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs, estimated to be worth around $41,000, to a stolen tractor unit and towed the Easter chocolate away. He was caught driving northbound on the M42 and walked toward the police with his hands up. That same year, 37 tons of olive oil were stolen from a mill in Halkidiki, Greece, costing the cooperative growers $348,000. “They don’t go for jewellery anymore, they go for olive oil,” one local reporter told The Guardian.
And on March 26, 2026, headlines (and memes) exploded with the news that 413,793—12 tons—of chocolate KitKat bars had been stolen in transit from Italy to Poland.
But the most stolen food in the world?
Cheese.
Cheesemakers are really, really strong. Ben Ticehurst is the head cheesemaker for Trethowan Brothers, the Somerset dairy that produces Pitchfork Cheddar: “It’s very physical. It’s an old-fashioned job. If you were designing it with modern health and safety standards in mind, you wouldn’t make cheeses that weigh 25kg.”
Artisanal cheese is a very different beast from commodity or “block” cheese—and the production processes are completely different. Block cheese is industrially mass-produced; it’s the stuff you find in the supermarkets, vacuum-packed, and always square or rectangular because it has been cut and repacked through automated processes, hence the nickname. The point of block cheese is uniformity and consistency. Artisanal or farmhouse cheese, on the other hand, cannot be made industrially. Those who make it use traditional, often manual methods, just producing small batches. It’s often seasonal, made from a single herd of cows, sheep, or goats, and can only be made using unpasteurized or raw milk. It’s slow, labor-intensive, and the cheese is bound in cloth or allowed to develop a natural rind. Cheese aficionados will tell you it’s a far superior product: a more developed flavor, with the ability to capture the terroir of the farm on which it is made. It is also enormously diverse. Artisanal cheeses, even those similarly made from nearby farms, are distinctively different from one another. For all these reasons, it commands a significantly higher price than the supermarket equivalent.
Joby Pool hitched a trailer containing 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs, estimated to be worth around $41,000, to a stolen tractor unit and towed the Easter chocolate away.
“The big difference is, when we say handmade, it genuinely is handmade. Literally everything is done by hand,” Ticehurst explains. While supermarket cheddars can call themselves handmade if not every element is automated and machine-led, the artisanal dairies are doing things the hard way. “When we’re mixing the salt in, we don’t have mechanical mixers, we have great big metal pitchforks, which is where our name comes from, and we do it by hand. We fling the curd around, we mill the sheets by hand, the cheddaring is done by hand, the moving and setting the presses, the cheeses are moved and lifted up. It is incredibly labor-intensive.”
“Cheddaring” is a unique step in the cheddar-making process: To achieve the distinctive dense texture and intense, sharp, hits-you-in-the-back-of-the-nose flavor that makes you go back for another piece, the curd blocks are cut into “loaves,” stacked, turned, and piled on top of one another. This stacked weight forces extra whey out, increasing the acidity and creating a firm, layered structure to the finished cheese. On a cheesemaking day at the dairy, each cheese mold—a great, big metal tin weighing around 10kg—has 27kg of curd poured into it. Those tins have to be moved. “You’re talking about nearly 40kg of tins moved by hand, lifting them up, putting them down. Obviously, where possible, we try to lift one tin with two people, but there are certain points when you might be loading a press, where it just isn’t possible.” All this physical labor equates to just 12 cheeses a day. Twelve-and-a-half tons of Pitchfork were sent to help complete the Neal’s Yard order—about 40 days of hard dairy labor.
Fifteen years earlier, 1,000 miles away, Northern Italy.
In the dead of night, a group of armed thieves creeps toward a locked vault. They successfully disarm the security system, set up their truck by the warehouse to receive their spoils, and use axes to break through the facility wall. Days before, they had laid the groundwork: planks of wood covered streams, and perimeter fencing had been opened with wire cutters in case a quick getaway on foot was needed.
Were they looking for jewels or priceless artwork? Gold bullion, perhaps?
No—Parmesan.
And they almost managed it. Around 400 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano were loaded onto their getaway vehicle before police—who had been alerted by security—apprehended the thieves.
Credito Emiliano SpA, where the attempted robbery happened, is, in fact, a local bank in the Emilia-Romagna region, the only place where Parmigiano Reggiano can be produced. Local Parmesan-makers, who have been subjected to multiple organized large-scale thefts over the years, have turned to the bank to store and protect their cheese. Such is the cheese’s worth that the bank also permits the wheels of cheese to be used by producers as collateral against loans. The cheese is in a purpose-built, climate-controlled storage facility that can hold 300,000 wheels (which take at least a year to mature, and are worth $950–$1,900 each). Roving patrols, motion-sensor lights, barbed-wire fencing, and a continuously manned camera control center provide strong security. Fabrizio Giberti, head of the facility, calls it the “Fort Knox of cheese.”
It’s a very popular place: The small, rural warehouses where the Parmesan is made are a constant target for organized crime. Between 2012 and 2018, the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano—the official, nonprofit protection body that represents all producers of Parmigiano Reggiano—estimated that $3 million in cheese was stolen each year.
Patrick Holden probably isn’t how you picture a dairy farmer. He wasn’t born into it. Arguably, he was called to it. After spending time in the San Francisco Bay Area as a 20-year-old in the 1970s, he became involved in the green movement. When he returned to the UK, he worked on an intensive dairy farm and then studied biodynamic agriculture. At 23, he joined the back-to-the-land effort and set up a community farm in Bwlchwernen Fawr, Wales. This later became Holden Farm Dairy, where Hafod cheese is produced. It was Hafod Cheddar that the initial enquiry to Neal’s Yard was about.
“An email popped up in my inbox with the subject line ‘Enquiry for a lot of cheese,’” Holden explains. “[Neal’s Yard] came to us and said, ‘Can we have 22 tons of Hafod cheese?’ and we said no.” Twenty-two tons represents three-quarters of the dairy’s annual production: “The most we could spare was two and a half tons.” Westcombe Dairy and the Trethowan Brothers Dairy were recruited to fill the rest of the order.
The quality—and price—of Hafod comes down to the holistic farming practices: “The cows are loved,” Holden says, “they’re fed real food from organic pastures, herb-rich, they’re not fed any genetically modified soy, and they’re a native breed. You know the phrase ‘you are what you eat?’ In the case of cheese and dairy products, it’s ‘you are what you eat ate.’”
“An email popped up in my inbox with the subject line ‘Enquiry for a lot of cheese[.]’”
As small dairies don’t produce vast quantities of cheese, they had to scramble to get the two and a half tons together. “Even for a wholesaler like Neal’s Yard, this was a huge order,” Ben Ticehurst explains. “It took quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to arrange so many pallets to leave the dairy all at the same time. The order had to be split into three collections.” Artisanal cheesemakers try not to keep an oversupply, and forecasting can be hard, as can logistics: The cheddar has to be aged for 12 months, and storage space is tight. “With cheddar, what you have is what you have. We just get the milk from the farm, turn the milk into cheese, and then sell what we’ve made. It’s a much more basic and old-fashioned way of doing business.”
But Holden was pleased with the huge order—happy about its international nature and that British cheddar was translating to foreign markets: “We were just rather proud. We thought, ‘How about that? The French are buying our cheese.”’
Cheese crime is an international problem. In 2016, Wisconsin dubbed their dairy thieves “cheese pirates”: 20,000 lbs of cheese worth $46,000 was stolen from a parking lot. Just a few months earlier, 100 wheels of Comte were stolen from a warehouse in Goux-les-Usiers—each wheel would cost around $2,500 today. In 2019, $187,000 worth of cheese was stolen from Saputo Dairy Products in Tavistock, Ontario: A man arrived at the business, presented paperwork, and the cheese was loaded onto a truck, only to disappear into the ether.
Four years ago, in Fijnaart, a town in the Netherlands, thieves broke into a cheese storage room and stole 3,500 lbs of cheese. Theo Dekker, then-chairman of the Dutch dairy farmers association, told The New York Times, “We’re worried about how professional this has become. These people come at night and take everything with brute force. It’s almost like organized crime.”
Last year, the Pieve Roffeno cooperative cheese factory was targeted, with 200 cheese wheels, valued at €100,000, stolen. The factory’s president noted the oldest, most valuable cheeses were targeted; local Bologna newspaper Il Resto del Carlino described the thieves as “industry experts.”
Neal’s Yard did not immediately smell a rat. Having gathered together their top cheddar producers, they were confident they could fulfil the order. The three dairies pulled out all the stops and got the order completed in double-quick time. The artisanal cheddars were brought together in the storage chambers beneath those railway arches in Bermondsey. Everything was going exactly to plan.
And on October 14, 2024, the cheese was collected, just like it was supposed to be. But neither the cheese nor the buyer was ever seen again. The 950 truckles—roughly the weight of a fully grown whale shark—disappeared without a trace. “We thought everything was legitimate, so we went on with it, Tom Calver recalls. “We loaded up the pallets for [Neal’s Yard], sent them to them, and they paid us. It was only about two or three weeks after we’d actually sent all the cheese up that they got in contact with us and said it was a scam.”
Shortly after the theft, a 63-year-old man was arrested for fraud by false representation and handling stolen goods, and was released on bail pending further enquiries. Several further arrests have since been made, but no charges have yet been brought; the investigation is a world away from convictions. The Metropolitan Police confirmed that there are no updates on the case at this stage: “The six arrested men remain released under investigation. Enquiries are ongoing.”
“Wisconsin dubbed their dairy thieves “cheese pirates”: 20,000 lbs of cheese worth $46,000 was stolen from a parking lot.”
A recent piece by The Guardian reported that cargo theft costs the UK economy around $950 million a year. The problem is that once things are moving, they are very hard to catch. The window to apprehend the culprits is a matter of hours, often closing before the crime is even noticed. And after that, the trail goes dark. The Guardian reported that in the UK, arrests are “almost exclusively made at road level, catching criminals as they attempt to drive stolen goods away. Until now, no serious investigations have taken place to look at the criminal networks above them.”
When he heard about the Neal’s Yard cheese theft, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver jumped onto his Instagram to appeal to his followers: “If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong ’uns . . . I don’t know—it feels like a really weird thing to nick.” But, as we know, it actually isn’t.
It’s September 1998, and the week before the British Cheese Awards. Jamie Montgomery of Montgomery’s Cheddar is the one to beat. Last year and the year before, his Somerset Cheddar won Best Cheddar and Best Traditional British Cheese. Can he make it a hat trick? But it wasn’t just the judges who had their eye on his cheese: That night, six tons of artisanal, matured cheddar were stolen from their warehouses. In one fell swoop, $58,000 of stock (roughly the equivalent of $92,000 today) just disappeared.
It wasn’t unheard of for this time of year: opportunist thieves looking for a cash injection before Christmas take off with trailers of cheese to pass off to repackers. But the target has always been bog-standard “block” cheese. Montgomery’s cheddar is about as far from that as you can get: round, aged, handmade, and cloth-bound. “Obviously,” Jamie says, “they’d heard about the premium Montgomery Cheddar, and they thought they would nick something that they could get more money for with less handling.”
But it turned out not to be that simple for the cheddar thieves. Making the most of the small world of cheesemaking, Jamie put the word out: “Mum just got the Yellow Pages out and rang every pub and restaurant in the South-West and said, ‘Look, if anybody comes to you with cheap, quality cheese, just let us know.’ So that made it quite tricky for them to start with.” His cheddar is hard to miss—beautiful clothbound truckles, a distinctive rind, a nutty, rich taste, and slightly crystalline texture. No one was going to be able to pass this off as “block” cheddar. And now everyone was on the lookout for it.
The cheese was first offered to block-cutters down South—but they turned it down. Block-cutters do what it says on the tin; they cut blocks, and Montgomery Cheddar’s shape meant their equipment literally could not cut it. Next, it appeared up North: a cheese dealer was offered the lot. He knew what he was dealing with and proposed $4,000 as a ruse to trap the thieves. But they got cold feet and went quiet. And that, really, was it. The thieves were never heard from again. The cheddar wasn’t found. No arrests were made. Jamie’s best guess is that this award-winning, highly sought-after, handmade cheese was shredded and sold off as regular grated cheddar after Christmas.
“Mum just got the Yellow Pages out and rang every pub and restaurant in the South-West and said, ‘Look, if anybody comes to you with cheap, quality cheese, just let us know.’”
The cheese had already been submitted to the awards, but it didn’t scoop the prize that year. Not that it mattered for Jamie Montgomery. “The timing was extraordinary,” he recalls. The PR company promoting the British Cheese Awards got hold of Montgomery’s misfortune and put out a very tongue-in-cheek story, saying it was one of Montgomery’s competitors trying to stop them winning again. Neither he nor anyone else ever really thought it was a jealous competitor who swiped the cheese. It was simply a nifty, throw-away PR comment. But the effect was huge. “Every paper ran it,” recalls Jamie, and they put the dairy’s number in the article. We played a game where we’d put the phone down and count to 10 [before it rang again]. All these people were saying, ‘Where can we buy the cheese?’”
The cheese itself wasn’t insured. It was a dead loss. But the column inches garnered by the PR agency generated an estimated $2.7 million of name-recognition, all describing Montgomery’s as “probably the best cheddar in the world.”
The thieves were never apprehended. So we’ll never know precisely what motivated them, or how they ultimately disposed of the cheese. What we can be confident of—they didn’t think their plan through. They had no buyer. They didn’t reckon on the smallness and tightness of the artisanal cheese world.
But times have changed. Cheese thieves aren’t so naive now: they’re organized.
Cheese isn’t an easy product to shift. It’s big. It’s heavy. It’s unwieldy. It’s smelly. It also needs to be held at very specific temperatures and humidity. It is its own microbiome: fat, enzymes, salt, bacteria, proteins, yeasts, molds. All of these—plus time—conspire to change the nature of the cheese. That’s why maturation is so important to the flavor and texture; it is an art form. Storing and transporting the cheese is technical and controlled. So if you’re suddenly going to find yourself in possession of tons of artisanal cheese, you’d better be prepared. Even a refrigerated van, or a temperature-controlled storage facility, is unlikely to cut it. Smash-and-grab, opportunistic cheese theft is a fool’s errand.
The Neal’s Yard thieves—who, after all, specifically asked for Hafod Cheddar—knew what they were dealing with. They likely had a plan, and we can make some guesses as to where their cheese ended up.
In August 2015, following sanctions imposed for the war in Ukraine, Russia began an aggressive ban on importing food from the US, the European Union, and other countries. Western foods had already been banned the previous year, after Putin retaliated against economic sanctions imposed by several states after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. But this first ban had been ineffective: After a roundup, authorities performatively crushed, buried, and burned 900 tons of contraband food, broadcasting the footage on state television.
As a consequence of the initial 2014 ban and doubling down in 2015, there is a thriving black market in Russia for high-end foods that are no longer legally available—chief among them, cheese.
Wild attempts have been made to circumvent the counter-sanctions. One chancer, who was stopped at the Russian border near Kaliningrad, was found to be carrying 1000 lbs of imported cheese. He valiantly claimed personal use, but the authorities didn’t buy it. Another, traveling from Finland, had stuffed 67 wheels of cheese into the side compartments of his Volkswagen.
And in May 2020, with the help of sniffer dogs, Russian customs seized 70 tons of contraband European cheeses that were being smuggled into the country. The cheese was hidden in four industrial containers purporting to hold a component used to produce rubber. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reported that Dorblu (a Bavarian, blue-veined cheese), Retinato Leone, Chèvrano XO (a Dutch goat’s cheese), and Grana Padano were all found in the shipment.
So if you’re suddenly going to find yourself in possession of tons of artisanal cheese, you’d better be prepared.
Russia is where many cheesemakers believe the Neal’s Yard haul ended up. Jamie Montgomery draws a clear line between the theft he suffered and the more recent heist: “There’s no point nicking that kind of cheese and trying to flog it [in the UK], because people would know immediately. That’s why the latest one had to be so sophisticated and get it out of the country.” Dr. Jonathan Davies, a criminologist from Manchester University, agrees: “You can’t just turn up with a van in front of a supermarket and say, ‘Hi, would you be interested in buying this?’ and easily sell it on if you’re not a trusted or verified supplier. Black market activity is probably the most likely indication.”
Professor Christopher Elliott, the founder of the Institute for Global Food Security and a senior scientific advisor to the UN, told the BBC, “Cheese and wine are two of the most common products being transported illegally into Russia.” He believes that cheese is making its way to Russia via Belarus and other former Soviet states, likely relabelled or branded to appear legal in Russia. “So much money is involved that officials, including border guards, can be paid off. Sanctioned goods are bought and sold through digital networks, and these online orders also make it into shops.”
The Neal’s Yard cheese could also have found its way across the pond.
America has a long history of cheese-conservatism. In 1949, the US Food and Drug Administration banned domestic production and subsequently the import of raw-milk cheeses aged for fewer than 60 days, after a typhoid outbreak in Canada was linked to young cheeses made with raw milk. This means that soft, raw-milk cheeses like Brie de Meaux, Camembert, Reblochon, Saint Nectaire, Baron Bigod, Morbier, Tomme de Savoie, Époisses, and many others can not be sold in America in their traditional versions. These are some of the most prized cheeses in the world.
There are pasteurized alternatives: regular bries and camemberts, certain Époisses and Vacherins, but cheese-lovers sniff at their supposed inferiority. Many of the other cheeses simply cannot be made with pasteurized milk, as they hold AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée) status, which dictates their components and production methods—and their unpasteurized nature. In 2014, authorities significantly lowered the threshold for acceptable bacteria levels in cheese, further restricting American access to unique and desirable cheese.
Even for those cheeses which can be imported into the US—like Parmiggiano Reggiano and pasteurized Vacherin and Camembert—things are looking bleak. Under the previous US trade deal with the EU, importers paid 15% on European cheeses. But President Trump’s new 15% tariff will sit on top of this, making the cheeses prohibitively expensive. Of course, cheese finds a way: Underground channels exist, and a black market for FDA-flouting and eye-wateringly expensive cheese exists in the US. As long ago as 2002, The New Yorker was reporting on a “raw-milk cheese underground.”
When Neal’s Yard was defrauded, they bore the losses themselves. The three dairies, who had worked so hard to provide the cheddar, were still paid. While this is commendable, many cheesemarkers rely on Neal’s Yard’s viability as a part of the industry. Tom Calver expressed anxiety over what the theft meant for them: “We were hugely concerned for that business. We are so reliant on Neal’s Yard. We’ve worked with them for such a long time. We were really concerned that having such a massive hit, the effect of that on all the other suppliers they have would be catastrophic.”
It can all sound like a bit of a joke: making off with hundreds of cloth-bound cheeses and evading the authorities has an air of slapstick about it. But aside from the financial loss— usually felt by small, heritage producers—it also speaks to wider systemic problems in the food chain. Many factors have converged to compromise supply chains and drive up food prices over the last decade: the pandemic, Brexit, the cost-of-living crisis, US tariffs, climate change, the war in Ukraine, and Russian counter-sanctions. So while food theft has always occurred, as the world gets more fragmented, global food security is becoming increasingly vulnerable. Last year, the British Standards Institute (BSI) reported a 79% spike in recorded food supply chain thefts, which accounted for a third of all global hijackings. Reginald Bevan, Deputy Head of the Food Standards Agency’s National Food Crime Unit in the UK, told me, “The drivers and motivations for food fraud are evolving . . . Food businesses should remain alive to food thefts.” And Professor Elliott, writing in December last year, sets out the gravity of the situation: “Food crime is not a trivial issue orchestrated by a few chancers. It is, in many cases, a well-organized, highly lucrative form of serious criminality.”
President Trump’s new 15% tariff will sit on top of this, making the cheeses prohibitively expensive.
These thieves know the industry. They know the jargon. Dr. Jonathan Davies explains that this suggests a nuance which is often missed when looking at organized food crime, that “there’s got to be a point where [the organized criminals] have a reliance on legitimate actors who are sometimes complicit, other times, unwittingly complicit. They know who’s a contact, how to pass yourself off as legitimate or trustworthy, a certain language.” Cheese as a product opens itself up to this kind of abuse: “Cheese relies on intermediaries—it doesn’t go directly from the farm necessarily to the buyer. There are distributors, wholesalers, importers . . . the more people you have involved in the process, the more difficult it is to keep track of what’s going on.”
And while bootleg cheese may not have the price tag that smuggled drugs or weapons can command, it carries both less danger and milder penalties if caught. The product is, in itself, legal and harmless. Whether the charged crime is cargo theft, handling stolen goods, or conspiracy to defraud, the sentence is always going to be lower than, say, supplying cocaine or possessing sawn-off shotguns. It’s a lower-stakes crime with good profit margins. Mike Dawber, the UK’s leading detective in freight crime, told The Guardian, “Your switched-on villains don’t do [drug crime] anymore, because if you get caught doing that, you’ll get 15 years. So they’ve moved on to less risky crimes.” Hard to track, in high demand, and literally eaten once passed on. Cheese is in the criminal crosshairs.
With the advances in digital technology, there are ways for cheesemakers to protect themselves. Parmesan producers have begun embedding salt-grain-sized, edible microchips into the rinds of their cheese to fight counterfeiting, unique IDs that will also combat redistribution through theft. But, as the producers’ technology improves, so will the fraudsters’. Professor Elliott voiced concerns about the potential for AI to make deceptions all the more convincing: “Voice cloning, automated negotiation bots and deepfake video calls can be used to impersonate legitimate suppliers, laboratories, certification bodies or regulators.” The artisanal food supply chain—like so many others in other industries—has become almost entirely digitalized, with most, if not all, of the communication and negotiation carried out remotely. We trust an e-signature more than a handshake, and in an industry where business associates once knew each other personally for decades, huge deals can now be done without the parties ever meeting. There have been suggestions following the Neal’s Yard theft that we should revert to the old ways of doing business: meet in person, visit sites, rely on personal relationships. But this is trickier when the appetite for cheese is now global.
Neal’s Yard doesn’t want to talk about the theft anymore. When I reached out to their director, David Lockwood, he told me they’ve stopped giving interviews about it: “We see it as a distraction from our work selling British cheese.” But it seems inevitable that cheesemakers, mongers, and other luxury food producers are treating their experience as a cautionary tale. Tom Calver admits, “It’s that age-old thing: if it seems too good to be true, it is.”
Olivia Potts is a food writer and chef. After a career as a criminal barrister, she retrained in patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu. Her latest cookbook, Butter: A Celebration, is published by Headline. Her first book, A Half Baked Idea: How grief, love, and cake took me from the courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu won the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book Award and is published by Fig Tree, Penguin. She was this year’s winner of the Guild of Food Writers’ Award for cookery writing.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
