From vegconomist.com
London’s Honestly Tasty has built up a fiercely loyal fanbase (there are vegan Facebook groups sharing tips on which stores to run to ASAP to stock up) with its delicious plant-based cheeses with names like Shamembert, Bree, Veganzola, and Herbivoursin – a few of which had to be renamed following cease and desist orders from their originals!
This artisan brand received funding from Veg Capital last June and since then has gone from strength to strength, securing listings at Ocado, Planet Organic, more than 70 independent stores, and most recently at 166 Marks and Spencer stores nationwide with its Blue, Shamembert, and Bree. If you’re in the UK, we cannot recommend the Blue highly enough.
HT says, “.. if something so simple as cheese is stopping people from giving veganism a go, we owe it to ourselves, and the planet, to try!” and we’re all about it.
Founders Mike & Beth ©Honestly Tasty
How did Honestly Tasty come to life?
Mike founded Honestly Tasty in 2018 after a successful Veganuary led to a permanent change in diet and lifestyle. There wasn’t one vegan cheese available that he thought rivalled its dairy counterpart, and he decided to fix that problem!
After an investigative trip to Berlin, he set up camp in his gran’s kitchen – and it all evolved from there!
Tell us more about the creation of your vegan cheeses – what does it take to make an “honestly tasty” cheese product?
When Mike set to work (and launched our first product, originally called Veganzola, now known as Blue… more on the later!) I think it’s fair to say that no one else in the UK was making vegan cheese in the same way.
You might need to fact-check this, but I think he was among the first here to combine novel methods with traditional cheese-making techniques – culturing vegan cheese, hand flipping each one individually on a daily basis, and leaving them to mature in order to develop depth of flavour. It takes a lot of care, some nifty knowledge, and hey it’s cheesy – but a whole lot of love!
After receiving cease and desist letters from dairy corporations, you decided to rename some of your cheeses. Can you tell us a little about the story and why you decided in favour of renaming the products in question?
We recently read that the government is choosing not to “stand in the way of trading standards officers publishing restrictions on the marketing of dairy alternatives” and it’s honestly shocking.
We’re yet to find an individual that we’ve confused and think it’s incredibly disappointing that we don’t have their support. Reducing meat and dairy intake is such an important way of protecting our planet, so it’s a real shame.
When we first launched, Mike pondered the name of our vegan Blue and I believe it was a friend of his that actually coined the term ‘Veganzola’ – it stuck pretty quickly, because we love a pun. Down the road, we actually figured that the cheese itself is not particularly akin to Gorgonzola – apart from the fact that both are inoculated with penicillum roqueforti – so a name change made sense to us internally, but was definitely spurred on by numerous cease and desist letters from a law firm in Italy!
To this day, they’re still on our case merely because the two have been compared in the past.
Then there’s our brand new Garlic & Herb – a former iteration was called Herbivoursin. Wonderfully named by the brilliant Jane Fallon after a brief back and forth on Twitter! Obviously heavily inspired by dairy gournay cheeses, we thought it was a great fit, until the letters started rocking up again, insisting that we were causing confusion (this was before a well-known brand launched this own plant-based gournay!).
We were sad to see the name go, and shortened it to Herbi for a while – but it didn’t really make sense abbreviated so as part of a recent relaunch, we saw it fit to call it what it is.
The alt-dairy industry as a whole found itself under pressure with Amendment 171, which sought to prohibit “imitation or evocation” of dairy products. What is your perspective on the controversial methods of big dairy and what can alt-dairy brands do to prevent such amendments to be legalized?
The main argument that people use to defend the word “cheese” is around the potential to mislead the public. It’s constantly being said that brands like ours are tricking people into thinking our products are something else… like we aren’t incredibly proud that we’re creating something new, in revolt!
We think it’s pretty disingenuous, language evolves. No one is arguing over peanut butter are they? And it’s quite hard to mislead people when we all prominently (and proudly!) say “vegan” or “100% plant-based” on our packaging and in all of our comms. We want the right people to be able to find us – like everyone marketing a product – and find it pretty wild that there are such concerted efforts to make this difficult for us and the increasing percentage of people who want to find us too!
Vegan cheese continues to grow, with OCADO reporting a whopping sales increase of 24% in the vegan cheese category during Veganuary – How did you experience the growing demand for vegan cheese during Veganuary and what has been your bestseller?
I think vegan cheese is finally starting to lose its terrible reputation, which is something we set out to do from day one. You now find our three bestsellers in Ocado and in M&S, hugely increasing our online and in-store presence, raising brand awareness, and getting into many more baskets than ever before!
Our vegan blue cheese and alternative to camembert (Shamembert) are both award-winners and our vegan brie (Bree) is a best-seller too. We’ve just launched our new Garlic & Herb which is nut and allergen free as well as being our most affordable cheese alternative to date – so we’re really excited to see that climb the ranks too.
How are you looking to develop your B2B business in 2023?
We’re just trying to get as many people as we possibly can to give our cheese a go! We want to encourage any changes both small or large, and acknowledge that they make a difference.
We have another mega announcement rounded up for the other side of summer, as we head back into the official cheese season. But this year, our Garlic & Herb becomes a real summer contender too; we’re increasing visibility and availability nationwide and have also started our journey to becoming nut-free.
Can you share any new innovations in the pipeline?
Definitely! Our nut-free journey is a big one. Replacing nuts with a combination of potato and tapioca starch as well as vegetable proteins is huge for us.
Through work with My Emissions, we recognised that one of the best ways to bring our carbon emissions down is to remove nuts from our cheeses. As well as opening ourselves up to a whole new customer base, front and centre of the decision-making was our impact on the environment.
But developing new recipes whilst maintaining or improving the existing tastes and textures has (and is!) quite the journey. We’ve just launched Garlic & Herb, with details on the rest to follow soon. We’re also looking at ways to fortify each cheese so that it can be loaded with a little extra goodness. Watch this space!
Where do you see Honestly Tasty in 5 years?
We want to become the leading producer of high-quality plant-based cheese. The last decade has seen a huge rise in delicious-tasting milk and meat alternatives, leaving one big, wedge-shaped gap in the market.
We started Honestly Tasty in 2018 to fill that gap – and not just to fill it, but to blaze a trail and prove that mouth-watering plant-based cheese is possible. After all, if something so simple as cheese is stopping people from giving veganism a go, we owe it to ourselves, and the planet, to try!
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