BFC deal strengthens specialty cheese credentials

Beston Global Food Company (BFC) has announced a strategic alliance with Australian Cheese distributor the Washed Rind Group (WRG).

Trading under brand names including Say Cheese Wholesale and Cheese Culture, WRG markets and distributes a range of cheese products to retail outlets and food service customers across Australia.

Under the agreement, WRG will distribute cheddar and other cheeses currently produced at the Beston Pure Foods factory at Murray Bridge, South Australia, and will purchase and age certain cheeses for distribution through WRG outlets around Australia.

The chairman of BFC, Dr Roger Sexton, said that the strategic alliance represented an important step closer to the realisation of the plans announced by BFC in December, to build a dedicated white mould (soft cheese) factory at Murray Bridge, adjacent to its existing hard cheese factory.

WRG will provide a broad range of specialty cheese advice to BFC with a view to producing a superior range of high-value soft cheeses to replace a proportion of cheeses currently imported from Europe and other regions.

The managing director of WRG, Peter Heaney, said that BFC dairy farms and other farms in Southern Australia are capable of producing the quality of milk required to produce white mould cheeses of a standard equal to or even better than many of the imported versions.

Heaney said that a lot of cheeses currently sold by his company are air freighted direct from overseas producers, adding costs and reducing shelf life.

“We are keen to support Australia’s burgeoning specialty cheese industry, and we see our strategic alliance with BFC as an extremely important way of delivering on this objective,” Heaney said.

The new factory will include an Educational Cheese Making Incubator, where graduates from the TAFE Artisan Cheese Academy at Regency Park, South Australia, will be able to transition to Murray Bridge on completion of their training, to practice their skills and experiment in the development of new cheese varieties.

The long-term trend of cheese consumption by Australians has slowly been increasing, including a move away from standard commodity-type cheeses, such as bulk cheddar, to non-cheddar cheese types, such as premium and specialty cheeses.

Dr Sexton said that the alliance with WRG reflected the determination of BFC to shift the focus of its cheesemaking facilities at Murray Bridge and Jervois away from commodity cheesemaking to specialist high-end, value-adding cheesemaking.

As an example, he noted that he had recently returned from Bangkok where BFC has launched a new Japanese-style flavoured cheese snack called Kyubu, developed by BFC specifically for the ASEAN market.