In the British cheese heist of 2024, scammers make off with $540,000 worth of cheddar

That’s a lot of cheddar.

A UK-based artisan cheese distributor, wholesaler and retailer says it “the victim of a sophisticated fraud” after scammers posing as retailers for a French wholesaler made off with more than $540,000 Cdn (£300,000) worth of cloth-bound, award-winning cheddar.

In one statement Posted on October 22, Neal Yard’s Dairy says it only realized the fraud after the cheese was delivered. A total of 950 wheels of cheese weighing 22 tonnes were stolen, the statement continued, including Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar and Pitchfork cheddar.

“Together these cheeses have won numerous awards and are among the most sought-after artisan cheeses in Britain,” the statement continued.

“The high monetary value of these cheeses likely made them a particular target for the thieves.”

Local and international authorities are looking for the perpetrators. Neal’s Yard Dairy added that it was still paying the three artisan cheesemakers in full.

Yet Tom Calver, director of Westcombe Dairy, said they were “devastated” by the fraud. Westcombe cheddar is 12 to 18 months old and made with unpasteurized milk.

“The process of making that cheese began almost three years ago when we planted seeds in the ground for the animals’ food,” Calver said in the statement.

“The amount of work that goes into caring for the cows, emphasizing best farming practices and transforming the milk, batch by batch, to produce the best cheese possible is beyond estimation. And to steal that. ..it’s absolutely horrible.”

In one Instagram videoBritish chef Jamie Oliver urged his 11 million followers to look out for ‘truckloads of very fancy cheese’.

“Cheese lovers are advised to be wary of suspiciously large quantities of premium cheddar on the black market,” he wrote alongside the video posted over the weekend.

‘Remember, if the deal seems too golden to be true, it probably is! Let’s find those cheese stealers.’

You Cheddar believes cheese robberies are common

Call it the Grate Cheese Heist of 2024, because it’s far from the first. Even according to Great Britain Center for Retail ResearchIn the early 2000s, cheese was the most stolen product in Britain and Europe.

Even earlier this year, in July, a court ruled that a German police officer who was fired for stealing cheddar cheese from an overturned truck while involved in a traffic accident could not get his job back. Reuters reports this that the police officer had been called to secure the scene of the accident, but instead ordered a rescue worker to hand him nine 20-kilogram packs of cheese, worth a total of approximately $834 (554 euros).

In 2022, thieves stole 161 cheese wheels worth about $32,000 from a Dutch cheese farmer. to the New York Times. Dairy farms in the Netherlands are frequently under fire with the website Dutch news reported in 2016 that 8,500 kilos of Dutch cheese, worth about $135,000, had been stolen the year before.

Italy is also often a target for Parmigiano-Reggiano thieves. In 2016, CBS reported that approximately $7 million worth of hard Italian cheese had been stolen over the past two years.

Some cheesemakers even store their wares in climate-controlled bank vaults, armed with security systems Euro newswho called the Parmigiano-Reggiano “edible gold” because each round of cheese is worth about $600 Cdn.

The US is not immune, with 20,000 pounds of fresh Wisconsin cheese worth about $64,000 nabbed by ‘cheese bandits’ in 2016. And in Canada, thieves ran away with $187,000 worth of cheese from Saputo Dairy Products in Tavistock, Ont., in 2019.

And you believe that’s not all (we apologize, we had to). Guelph, Ontario, has seen a surge in butter thefts. Guelph police say there have been seven ‘large-scale’ butter thefts during the past ten months, two of which were in October. The most recent cases resulted in losses of more than $900 each.

In August, $800 worth of butter was taken from two Guelph stores. And in December, police in Guelph arrested three men after $1,000 worth of butter was stolen from a store on the city’s south side.