{"id":3494,"date":"2014-02-09T20:06:29","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T01:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/?p=3494"},"modified":"2014-02-09T20:06:29","modified_gmt":"2014-02-10T01:06:29","slug":"running-cheese-shop-dummies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/running-cheese-shop-dummies\/","title":{"rendered":"Running a Cheese-Shop \u2026 For Dummies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This guest blog series is by Andy Swinscoe, who recently opened <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecourtyarddairy.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Courtyard Dairy<\/a> in North Yorkshire, England.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr>\n<h3>The first few weeks.<\/h3>\n<p>First of all, I needed customers. I\u2019m still working on that one. We all have friends and family, but after I\u2019d persuaded all of those nice people to buy, I still needed an actual client base\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Thankfully, the wine shop was sending me customers, but I needed more than that. So\u2013how was I to get people in to buy, and then to spread the word? Social media worked: Contacting the local good-food bloggers and regular tweeting people to get them in. I also went around the little town of Settle and spoke to the TIC staff and pub landlords, spreading the word about my cheese and charcuterie. This and the local rags and newspapers started to get the shop\u2019s name about. But by far the most successful was door-to-door leaflet drop to the local population. Not just any old leaflet. Each of the 600 had my personally hand-written note on it. It generated a 20% response. Who said door-to-door was dead?<\/p>\n<p>What with a few customers and starting to sell a bit of cheese, I put the procedures in place. But I was not looking forward to the visit from the Environmental Health Officer (EHO) even though I knew the regulations inside out\u2013in order to age the cheese and keep it on wood at 13\u00b0C (55.5\u00b0F) I had made sure I knew exactly what I was doing. I risk-assessed each cheese and its maturity on arrival with me, checking their acidification profiles, water activity (i.e. how much moisture was left in it), the final pH of the cheese, and its milk supply route. That, along with my knowledge and documentation, would see me through I hoped\u2026but I was still nervous, some people can be very afraid of unpasteurised cheese, especially since I hold it at maturing temperature, and on wood!<\/p>\n<p>But I had nothing to fear. For once luck was on my side. My EHO had taken a course with Paul Neaves, demi-god on cheese microbiology in the UK**, was fully proficient and, thankfully, understood cheese. Those sleepless nights had ended\u2026<\/p>\n<p>So was following my dream, opening a specialist cheese maturer and shop, worth it? Well, I used to be quite successful in the cheese-world. Now I simply own a small shop in the middle of nowhere.<\/p>\n<p>But I wouldn\u2019t change it for the world.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/sites\/all\/files\/Amy_Blog\/CourtYard-Dairy\/TheCOurtyardDairy1.jpg\" width=\"665\" height=\"441\"><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>**Paul Neaves is author of the \u2018Specialist Cheese-maker Association Guide of Best Practice\u2019 (the best \u00a315 I\u2019ve ever spent) and sits on their technical committee, which advises the Food Standards Agency and works with them to improve everyone\u2019s understanding of cheese, particularly unpasteurised cheeses \u2013 a harmonious rather than adversarial relationship which has worked in the UK to the benefit of everyone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<hr>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This guest blog series is by Andy Swinscoe, who recently opened The Courtyard Dairy in North Yorkshire, England. The first few weeks. First of all, I needed customers. I\u2019m still working on that one. We all have friends and family, but after I\u2019d persuaded all of those nice people to buy, I still needed an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[360],"coauthors":[361],"class_list":["post-3494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-global-cheese"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.4 (Yoast SEO v24.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Running a Cheese-Shop \u2026 For Dummies - culture: the word on cheese<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/running-cheese-shop-dummies\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Running a Cheese-Shop \u2026 For Dummies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This guest blog series is by Andy Swinscoe, who recently opened The Courtyard Dairy in North Yorkshire, England. 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