As part of our Lancashire food revolution series, we chat with 4th generation owner of Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses in Inglewhite, near Preston, about the area's special produce.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 There's absolutely a food revolution happening around Lancashire.
00:04 The thing that's sustained us as a business over, since 1932, has been a constant thirst
00:11 for innovation and keeping quality at the forefront of what we do.
00:16 So the lush pasture lands of Lancashire provide excellent milk.
00:20 We help to make that into fantastic cheese.
00:23 If you make a great quality product and people are putting it in their mouths, chances are
00:28 if it tastes good, they're going to keep coming back for more year after year and that's what
00:32 we like to think we're doing here.
00:34 We're sourcing all of our milk here from a 10 mile radius.
00:37 The majority comes from my uncle's farm across the road, but otherwise we're supporting six
00:42 dairy farms all the way across rural Lancashire.
00:46 And do you think being in Lancashire plays a part in the quality?
00:50 Being based in Lancashire, using milk from this kind of 10 mile radius from where we
00:53 are here at the dairy in Inglewight, makes a massive difference on the quality of the
00:58 cheese that we make.
00:59 Do you want to talk me through a few of the cheeses that we've got here?
01:02 Yeah, sure.
01:03 So we've got a cheese board here.
01:05 We'd like to say it's kind of the perfect British cheese board.
01:08 It's all here from rural Lancashire.
01:11 We've got a hard cheese, which is our Sunday best, an authentic Lancashire cheese, which
01:19 very much is the spine of a lot of people's cheese boards, a hard cheese, rich and savoury,
01:24 got a great tang to it.
01:26 Then we've got Blacksticks Blue, which is a luscious, rich blue cheese, super savoury,
01:35 really got those rich umami flavours.
01:38 And then we pair that with Buttermilk, which is our soft, camembert style cheese, which
01:47 again, to have a Lancashire maker that's able to do hard, soft and blue cheese all
01:53 in one dairy is really something that's quite unique.
01:56 And I think that's what's keeping the chefs and the restaurants coming back to us time
02:01 and time again, because when we started in 1932, my grandma developed this recipe in
02:08 1969, we were just making hard cheese.
02:12 We're taking these products now beyond Lancashire.
02:14 So you've got the products that are started in Lancashire, which is fantastic, but actually
02:19 the appeal of something like a Blacksticks or a Buttermilk goes beyond the Lancashire
02:24 borders and we are able to take that onto a national scale, which is really quite exciting.
02:28 And what do you think is happening in Lancashire at the moment with the food revolution?
02:31 Do you think there is a food revolution?
02:34 It started in COVID.
02:36 People started to wake up a little bit to the quality and the breadth of products that
02:42 they could get on their doorstep.
02:44 People were starting to think, how can I buy local?
02:46 How can I shop local?
02:48 Then we had the supply chain challenges in 2022 and people were again seeing bare shelves
02:55 and it was the local producers that they could continue to get those quality products from.
02:59 And so now, as we're starting to see a bit more of a cost of living conversation come
03:04 up, people are wanting to support those producers that have supported them for the last few
03:08 years and people are recognising that actually paying a little bit more for their food is
03:14 getting them an exponentially better product on their plate.
03:18 And that's the bit that I think is the exciting part for us moving forward with that food
03:22 revolution as you say.
03:24 People are recognising that products with purpose, quality and handmade, locality of
03:30 where something's come from, manufactured by people who actually care about what they're
03:34 doing is way better to put in your mouth.
03:38 And do you think family run businesses like yourselves that have been going on for so
03:42 long are making a name for Lancashire and putting Lancashire on the map in terms of
03:46 food?
03:47 The renaissance that we're seeing in terms of cheese but also in terms of people looking
03:52 for products with purpose means that we're putting more of a media spotlight than ever
03:58 before on these Lancashire producers and that's really exciting for me because ultimately
04:02 we can fill an entire restaurant's menu from starter all the way through to dessert with
04:08 product sourced in Lancashire.
04:10 But more importantly I think that media attention is starting to take these products beyond
04:14 the borders of Lancashire.
04:15 We're starting to see Lancashire products on a menu in London and people starting to
04:20 recognise that actually something like Black Sticks is a product that deserves to be on
04:25 a London cheese board not just a Lancashire cheese board and that's starting to really
04:30 help put Lancashire on the map from a tourism point of view as well.
04:34 Do you think with Lancashire being such a close knit community like in terms of your
04:38 uncle owning the farms, do you think that helps in terms of the quality?
04:43 That desire for honest manufacture, honest living, honest prices and good quality proper
04:51 food is what Lancashire's about and that's the ecosystem that we've got here so when
04:56 we're looking for milk and we're speaking to a local Lancashire farmer we know that
05:02 we're going to be talking about great quality milk with high welfare standards on the farms.
05:07 That's a given because that's in the DNA of people producing food in this area.
05:13 And what makes butlers so quality stand out so much above the rest?
05:18 I think our quality is about care, dedication, passion.
05:23 As budgets get tighter people want to put their money into things that matter and eating
05:29 good quality food is something that's accessible to the majority of us in one way or another
05:37 and shopping a little bit smarter, going direct to the producer, that actually gets you a
05:42 great bang for your buck.
05:44 We've got 100 people who are passionate beyond belief when it comes to Lancashire products
05:51 and if you've got a passion for something you're going to go the extra mile to find
05:55 a way to take that product in its best possible way all the way through to the end consumer
06:00 on their plate.