British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has appealed to his cheese-loving fans to help police identify fraudsters who defrauded a London dairy of more than £300,000 worth of English and Welsh cheddar.
Jamie Oliver, a staunch family man, is asking for the help of cheddar lovers. Archive photo
Neal’s Yard Dairy, a British artisan cheese distributor and retailer, delivered 22 tonnes of award-winning, cloth-bound cheddar to a fraudster who posed as a distributor for a large French retailer and later realized that he was cheated, The Guardian reports.
Jamie Oliver, 49, who described the incident as a “shameless robbery of shocking proportions”, told his social media followers to be wary if they heard anything about “shipments of premium cheese” being offered “bargain price”, stating that the cheddar was originally worth around £300,000.
The cheeses stolen were Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar and Pitchfork cheddar, which have won a number of awards and are among the UK’s “most sought-after artisan cheeses”, according to the defrauded distributor, Neal’s Yard Dairy. The three varieties of cheddar cheese retail for between £7.15 and £12.90 for a 250-300g piece.
Neal’s Yard Dairy, one of the UK’s leading distributors and retailers of local artisanal cheeses, has announced that it has paid the small producers of the stolen cheese – Hafod, Westcombe and Pitchfork – to stay out of the scam.
The famous Jamie Oliver has thus joined Neal’s Yard Dairy, which is asking cheesemongers around the world to contact them if they suspect they have been sold stolen cheese – meaning ten and 24kg wheels of cheddar wrapped in cloth and whose tags have been removed.
