By Brian Melley
London: British chef Jamie Oliver is on the case of the stolen cheddar.
Oliver, who rose to fame as The Naked Chef on TV by stripping food down to its essentials, got cheeky in an otherwise serious plea to his social media followers to help solve the mystery of a missing 22 tonnes of award-winning cheddar worth £300,000 ($589,000) stolen in a scam.
Calling it the “grate cheese robbery”, Oliver told his 10.5 million Instagram fans to be on the lookout for “lorry loads of very posh cheese”.
Clothbound cheddar.Credit: AP
Nearly 1000 wheels of cloth-wrapped artisanal cheddar were swiped from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London by a con artist posing as a wholesale distributor for a major French retailer, the company says. The cheese was gone before the company realised it had been scammed. It reported the theft on October 21.
“If the deal seems too gouda to be true, it probably is! Let’s find these cheese stealers,” Oliver wrote.
British chef Jamie Oliver wants to help.Credit: AP
Cheddar, named after the village in south-west England where it originated, is the world’s best-known cheese because it lacks the protected status of other regional products such as champagne and is therefore produced in many countries. There are, however, only a few real British cheddar makers, Oliver says.
“These are some of the cheeses, or most of them, that got nicked,” he said in a video accompanying his post.
The cheeses were from three makers: Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar and Pitchfork cheddar.
Detectives at Scotland Yard and international authorities are searching for the culprits.
Neal’s Yard Dairy, a distributor, wholesaler and retailer of British artisanal cheese, has asked international cheesemongers to be on the lookout for the stolen cheese, particularly in 10- and 24-kilogram blocks.
“If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong ’uns,” Oliver said.
The company has paid its three suppliers despite being out of pocket.
A spokesman told the London Telegraph that the company had disclosed the theft as a warning to other businesses.
“The fraud was deceptively convincing, with the perpetrators impersonating a reputable distributor well known within the European cheese industry who had previously organised large artisan cheese promotions for the French retailer,” he said.
He said the fraudsters went as far as drawing up a contract and outlining payment terms.
AP