Starting a cheese shop with Adam Verlander of Jericho Cheese

I always had an interest in good food and wine, but it's certainly not how I started out. I used to work for a telecoms company that doesn't exist anymore. I did that for about 10 years before I realised I wasn't really doing something that I enjoyed. 

I quit and went travelling. That time was spent thinking about what comes next. I had no real plan. I didn't know what part of food I wanted to work in. I didn't break it down by sector or type of job. 

When I came back to London, it was really by accident that I stumbled upon Neal’s Yard Dairy.  I was working as a bicycle courier, which, in London at that time, was probably one of the most physically demanding jobs you could do. It was a horrible day in late November. It was snowing and I was freezing cold, so I decided to go for a pint at the Market Porter to cheer myself up. While I was having a pint, I was stood outside watching the guys at the Borough Market shop do a close down. 

I just thought it looked like the most beautiful thing, so I knocked on the door. Someone kindly opened it. They didn't just shoo me away. I asked, “how do you get to work here?” And they said, “well, Christmas is coming, we always hire new people.” So, I sent an application, got an interview, and started as a Christmas temp. That was all the way back in 2010. 

It was a lot of fun. It was really intense.  

Obviously, we were given the training we needed, but it was very quick, so there was a bit of a sink or swim element to it. I had to quickly learn how to talk to people about a subject in which I was inexpert and try to come across as someone who knew what they were talking about. 

The Borough shop was so busy. I'd never seen anything like it. I realised, “wow, there’s a lot of cheese changing hands on those really busy days.” 

It was amazing to be part of it, but also a sight to behold. I had friends coming in to buy their Christmas cheese, and they couldn’t believe I worked at this legendary cheese shop.  

It was only a few weeks’ work but fortunately, they were hiring into the new year, and I must've done something right, because they offered me a permanent role and within a few months I started working as an assistant retail manager, a role I continued all the way until 2016. 

If I was going to pick one thing I’ve taken from those early days, it would be learning how to talk to people in a way that makes them want to buy things. Which, if you'd have asked me before I started, I wouldn't have thought that was even a thing. They want it, you're selling it, how hard can it be? Actually, it's a bit of an art, talking to people in a way that gives them confidence in what you’re selling. 

There’s also the importance of flavour; the importance of giving people a taste of that cheese. That way, it’s not just your interpretation of the flavour. Also, the importance of trying things when the customer’s trying them: having a shared experience, talking about it afterwards, and then, negotiating a sale of a piece of cheese. 

I worked with such great people. There was my manager at the time, Michael Jones. Later, Martin Tkalez, who now makes Pevensey Blue, was a big influence. He really showed me how having fun leads to a good atmosphere which leads to good sales. If you’ve got good cheese as well, the whole thing just works. 

OK, this isn't a fluff answer: it's different for every person. A lot of what you learn is how to read your customer and tailor their experience in a way that means more to them; essentially, to show them a good time. 

Some people don't want a lot of talk. They want to keep it quick: just taste cheese and decide without much verbiage. But other people really want to know stuff and feel part of the story. They might want to spend a good quarter of an hour in the cheese shop, trying a whole bunch of different things. 

I try to figure out what they want, not just from first appearances. I say, “hi, how’s it going?” and then maybe I offer them a piece of cheese. The way they respond to those things might tell me that this person wants to be in and out. If I make that happen, they’re going to be really happy. Or maybe this person is curious and hasn’t been in a shop like this before. In that case, I’ll give them a little tour. We can try some easy-to-like cheeses and then move on to some more challenging cheeses, see what they think, and have a meaningful conversation about it. 

Probably about four or five years in. I knew that I'd found something I really enjoyed. It didn't cross my mind that I would leave Neal's Yard Dairy because it seemed like such a great place to work. If I was staying in London, I would almost certainly have tried to carry on working for Neal's Yard Dairy. 

But that wasn’t to be the case because when I met my husband, we decided that we wanted to live in the countryside. So, I needed to figure out what that meant and what I was going to do. Was there another company I’d like to work for? I couldn’t really put my finger on anywhere from my exposure in those first five years. So, I started a conversation with Directors David Lockwood and Jason Hinds about the idea of having my own shop and they suggested that maybe they could help.   

There were lots of conversations about where and how. Jason was a really good mentor in those early days. Once we’d established that Oxfordshire would be a good place for us to live, we would walk the streets of different neighbourhoods in Oxford and try to figure out where our customers might be hanging out, even though the business didn’t exist yet. We’d wander around and see if we could spot the kinds of people we could imagine buying cheese on a regular basis in Oxford. Eventually, we settled on Jericho. The name we chose came from where our first location was and still is. 

It was mostly just me. So, I would enlist the help of other people. I think Jason worked with us on our very first day, and that was great because I’d never really seen Jason work behind the counter before. Jamie Hall, who went on to make Townsend Farm apple juice and Andrew Lowkes who later set up Landrace in Bath came and worked with me here and there. 

I would enlist anyone I knew who had the skills to come and put a white coat on and help me out on a busy Saturday, my husband included. Or maybe a producer would come over, and I’d rope them into selling a bit of cheese, not just their own. There was a lot of help from people like Jon Tasch with the numbers and setting up the business. Any help I could get.  

It was long hours, building something from scratch. Because it also started with a huge building project—converting a quite unloved unit that hadn’t been used for anything in years into somewhere that felt wholesome enough to buy and sell cheese. That was my first taste of managing a budget and a set of contractors and getting them to do things the way I wanted them done. 

Soon came the day we were ready enough and really had to open the doors and start selling cheese. That was such a big moment. I think there’s a photo somewhere of what the display looked like, and looking back, it didn’t look that great. I hadn’t even opened many of the cheeses, but people were coming in, wanting to try this and that. I was a little bit up against it, but it just felt like we had to get this thing open. You can faff around trying to get everything absolutely perfect, but at the end of the day, we were really there to do one thing: sell amazing cheese from Britain and Ireland. 

Opening day at Jericho Cheese Company.

I've always felt really empowered to make decisions and run it as my own business with a partner who's always there to support when needed. 

There's not a lot of "you must do this in this way." Obviously, what I learned about how to sell cheese was learned through working at Neal's Yard Dairy, and I wanted to keep that. I didn’t really want to fundamentally change or reinvent the wheel, as it were. 

We catch up in person, if we can, on a quarterly basis these days. Sometimes we focus on the numbers, sometimes we focus on cheese quality, and sometimes we just have a chat. It depends on whether there's anything particularly pressing that we need to discuss. 

I don’t know if I can put my finger on how it's changed, other than that we've all, can I say, matured? Now, over eight years in, we understand each other. We talk in the same language, in terms of how we want the business to run and how we want it to develop over time. 

We’ve learned a lot about our customers and what makes them happy: the importance of regulars, and how understanding them and what they want and need is crucial. 

We stayed open throughout the pandemic and we learned a lot about how to look after people. We were taking things to people’s homes because they couldn’t come out and get to us. We were taking food to people who were shielding because they couldn’t get outside. 

That changed us in terms of reaffirming how important it is to know your regular customers and keep them with you. They are the bedrock of our sales. If we look after them, we’ll have a strong business. 

We are primarily selling cheeses that are bought from Neal's Yard Dairy, albeit an edited selection of the full range. I like to think of it as my favourite 40-odd cheeses that the dairy is selling at the moment. 

We've been focusing quite a lot this week on Yoredale. There were no raw milk farmhouse Wensleydale producers when we first opened. There are now three that I know of: Yoredale, Whin Yeats, and Stonebeck. 

We used to sell all three at one time, but sometimes with similar styles of cheese, we need to edit it down a little bit further just to keep the quality high. At the moment, we're selling the Stonebeck and the Yoredale.  

I've just been loving the Yoredale recently. It's so light and yogurt-y and creamy. Because Wensleydale is one of those well-known cheeses, like Cheddar, a lot of people have an opinion about it already. They have a memory of it, or they have an expectation of what this cheese is going to taste like.  

When you give them a taste of something like the Yoredale, it's reminiscent of that, but it's actually pretty different.  We're selling a decent amount of Yoredale as a result of just standing outside with a piece of cheese to get people who are not yet customers to try it. Then we’ll have a little conversation like, "Oh, it doesn’t really taste like the Wensleydale I used to know."  We can explain: "Well, you know, this is raw milk, farmhouse, small scale Wensleydale... maybe you’d like a piece to take home?" 

 And when they say yes, it's a really nice moment. 

In 2021 we took a big step and opened a second site. That brings its own challenges. If you're one person who likes selling cheese and wants to run a business, and you can do it all in one building, you can see everything and taste everything and keep an eye on everything. That's very different to having it split across two sites. You can only be in one place at a time. 

Developing teams and giving people responsibilities and really trusting people to do things the way that you would do them has been a bit of a learning curve. I think we're getting it OK! 

I'm proud of all the guys and girls who work for us and really uphold the standards, really care for our customers, and really care for the cheeses. Those are the most important bits of what we do. We can't sell bad cheese because we made it into bad cheese by our own neglect. We can't abuse our customers. We've got to keep them close and respect them. We've got to look after the spaces we work in because these are our cheese homes. 

I quite often get asked: "When are you opening the third one?"  

That's not in the cards for me at the moment. I think two is plenty for now.