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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...