The Grate Cheese Robbery

Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times. Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today. 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.