From a kitchen table operation in Altrincham to award-winning cheesemaker in a few short years – and Claire Burt still has to pinch herself to believe it
It has been a bit crazy," grins Claire Burt. Then, sheepishly, she adds, "I feel slightly cheeky, if I'm being honest, with all the success and attention, even though my company is still small."
Claire is the Burt behind Burt's Cheese, which started as an idea at the kitchen table in her terraced house in Altrincham, and is now an award-winning independent cheese company.
Hers is an old-fashioned, romantic tale of a tiny family business that made a name for itself. Burt studied a degree in food and nutrition and spent several years working in the industry in product development roles, during which she was required to go on a soft cheese-making course. "I liked everything about the process – the smell, being hands-on – but I didn't really think more about it at the time."
A couple of years later, she decided she wanted to launch her own cheese company, although she was slightly naive about the challenge at first. "I sat down with a friend who's an accountant and said, 'If I make 100 cheeses and sell them I'll make this much'. He just said, 'What if you don't sell any?' and asked me how much wastage there would be. I hadn't thought about that."
Undeterred, but a little more realistic, Burt began developing the cheese on her kitchen table. Burt's is a semi-soft cheese, deceptively rich and shot through with blue veins. Why did she opt for a soft blue? "I'd like to say it was down to extensive research, but it's the cheese that I would like to eat. I was just lucky in that modern British blues do seem to be having a revival."
She had her cellar tanked and moved production down there in 2009, but took some time out when she had her first child Noah later that year – "I thought I shouldn't really taste soft blue cheese if I was pregnant, because of the risk of listeria. But everyone takes every precaution with their first child. By the time I had my second child I was confident in the product and testing regularly."
The turning point was when Claire entered the specialist cheesemakers class at the International Cheese Awards in Nantwich in 2010, and unexpectedly won. "When I won gold, the class was quite big, including some major producers, and they were a bit like 'and who are you?' 'Er, I just make this cheese…'"
It was the confirmation she needed that Burt's Cheese could be a serious business. "For me it was a confidence booster more than anything else."
She soon moved from her cellar into a small room at the rear of the nearby Cheshire Cookery School in September 2010 – "My dad, bless him, got dragged in to help me out, and he has no interest in cheese" – then in 2011 came further awards at the Fine Food Awards and British Cheese Awards. Lancashire chef Simon Rimmer then used it on Channel 4's Sunday Brunch for his recipe for figs marinated in sweet sherry with Burt's blue cheese salad. Now it's in 20 stockists across the north-west, including the Manchester branch of Harvey Nichols, with Claire still making most of the deliveries herself.
"Sometimes I think I really should have thought it through before I started," she says. "But naivety can sometimes be a good thing."
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