The celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has encouraged cheese lovers to help police catch scammers who defrauded a London dairy out of more than £300,000 worth of English and Welsh cheddar.
Neal’s Yard Dairy, a distributor and retailer of British artisan cheese, delivered 22 tonnes of award-winning clothbound cheddar to the alleged fraudster posing as a wholesale distributor for a large French retailer before realising it had been duped.
Oliver, 49, described the incident involving more than 950 wheels of cheddar as a “brazen heist of shocking proportions”.
He told followers on Instagram to be alert if they heard anything about “lorryloads of very posh cheese” being offered “for cheap”, adding that the cheddar would have originally been worth about £300,000.
The stolen cheeses were Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar, and Pitchfork cheddar, which have won a number of awards and are among “the most sought-after artisan cheeses in the UK”, Neal’s Yard Dairy has said.
It said it had still paid Hafod, Westcombe and Pitchfork, the small-scale producers of the stolen products, so they would not have to bear the cost.
The three cheeses sell for between £7.15 and £12.90 for a small piece weighing 250-300g.
Neal’s Yard Dairy added it was working with the Metropolitan police to identify the perpetrators.
The dairy is calling on cheesemongers around the world to contact them if they suspect they have been sold the stolen cheese, particularly clothbound cheddars in a 10kg or 24kg format with the tags detached.
On Friday, the Met said in a statement it was investigating a “report of the theft of a large quantity of cheese” from a London outlet.
“Inquiries are ongoing into the circumstances,” it said, adding that no arrests had been made so far since the theft was reported on Monday.