Last year Matthew Hall watched the family business burn to the ground. Next came a battle to get Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses back on track
Last year Matthew Hall watched the family business burn to the ground. Next came a battle to get Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses back on track
On a cold November night last year, Matthew Hall watched his livelihood burn to the ground. He had woken earlier to the sound of his mother throwing rocks at his window and saw “in her eyes” that it was serious.
They drove to the family farm in rural Lancashire, home of Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses, of which Hall is the fourth-generation owner. There, his legs turned “instantly to jelly babies”, he says. “I can’t describe the smell that lingers heavy in the air from something like that. It’s horrible.”
The blaze – for which there is still no explanation – was devastating. A warehouse the size of two football pitches was destroyed; hundreds of tonnes of cheese were lost. A day earlier, the Butlers factory had been preparing Christmas orders for customers including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and M&S. By morning, the business, established by Hall’s great-grandparents almost a century ago, was little more than ashes and rubble.
Speaking eight months later, the emotion from that night is still apparent in Hall. But so too is the family resilience and passion that have rescued Butlers from the brink. Already, the dairy is back on its feet.
Name: Matthew Hall
Job title: Fourth generation owner, Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses
Age: 35
Marital status: Married with two children, two cats and two dogs
Potted CV: BBA in management at Lancaster University Management School; marketing assistant at Sara Lee; marketing & category management at Bel UK; joined the family business in the commercial team
Best piece of advice received? “If not you, who? If not now, when?”
Currently reading: No Bullsh*t Strategy – Alex MH Smith
Death row meal: BBQ burgers with Blacksticks Mega Melts
Never leave home without: AirPods
Plans for the rescue mission were already in motion before first light after the night of the fire. Hall and his brother Dan, who run the business with their mum Gill as chair and “guardian of great cheese”, quickly realised what they had to do. “It was the mindset of, ‘in a few hours’ time we’ve got farmers sending us milk,” he says. “So, we’ve got to turn milk to cheese.”
That’s not easy, though, when you’ve no factory and no income, and customers are on the phone asking where their cheese is. Not to mention a team of staff fearful for their future. “There was a lot of upset in the air, a lot of disbelief, a lot of confusion,” Hall adds. “We were doing a lot of reassurance.
“We made clear very quickly that whatever happened, we would pay staff, we would pay farmers. We had no idea where the money would come from, but we knew we had to achieve it.”
The next job was finding somewhere they could continue making cheese. The only option was to construct a building on a site six miles away. “We built it in six weeks in the Lancashire winter – every day apart from Christmas,” Hall says, with pride.
More from The Dairymen 2024:
-
How the dairy category is getting fit for the future
-
Creative challenge: next-gen packaging ideas to liven up dairy
-
How can plant-based grow again? Dairymen British cheese category report 2024
-
Why is Unilever selling its cream business?
‘It’s messy, but no one cares’
From the outside it’s easy to see nothing but positives since the fire. Butlers’ signature Blacksticks range returned to supermarkets in February, value sales have reached 60% of pre-fire levels, and the business has become the largest independent maker of soft cheese in the UK after buying Hampshire Cheese Co.
But on the inside, the reality feels very different. As might be expected, a crisis facility thrown up so quickly was not without problems. In one instance, a power cut meant a Land Rover had to be used to jump-start the site’s generator for a day. “It’s messy, but no one cares,” Hall says. “As a retailer, you just need your order out the door.”
That’s just a fraction of the day-to-day struggles the Butlers team faces as it produces cheese in a space a tenth of the size of the original factory. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out how complicated and time-consuming that’s going to be,” he adds.
“You’re cutting things by hand. You’re moving things around a gazillion times a day to try and create space. It’s not sexy, it just is what it is. And it’s going to be that way for a little while.”
The work can be a punishing. Hall describes it as “like running a marathon in clogs and getting a PB at the same time. It’s a lot of hard yards, a lot of midnight oil, a lot of grit and determination and just a real quiet dedication to our craft.”
The purchase of Hampshire Cheese Co in March – for an undisclosed amount – surprised some given Butlers’ seemingly precarious financial situation. The business suffered multimillion-pound losses in the fire and is still waiting on an insurance payout.
Still, Hall maintains the deal was the right decision. “It was really shitty timing to try to add that extra complication to our lives, but it was the right thing to do for our strategic direction. It’s that farming grit that just makes you keep going.”
By adding Hampshire’s two camembert-style cheeses, Butlers’ range has expanded to 14 – a diversity Hall feels is crucial in conversations with retailers. “We’re about discovery of different cheeses, so you can come to us as a retailer and I’m not trying to sell you one thing. We can be generally agnostic when it comes to the category.”
‘Agnostic’ is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but Hall is certainly on the right track. As an artisan cheesemaker, he is a strong advocate for the more than 750 cheeses produced in Britain today. He applauds the “wild array of amazing products out there” while simultaneously lamenting the fact that “50% of consumption remains cheddar”.
“It’s like running a marathon in clogs”
At its heart, Hall’s ambition is to place cheese at the centre of all types of cooking. Butlers’ Blacksticks Mega Melts, for example, is designed for pairing with premium burgers, because “if you’re spending some serious dollar on a nice burger you probably want a really great piece of speciality cheese to go on top”.
To realise its vision, Butlers is putting its money where its mouth is. A campaign on buses and billboards kicked off in the summer across Manchester, while the next 18 months should see the opening of a state-of-the-art cheesemaking campus at its facility. The site will be used “to create a melting pot for innovation and ideas”, according to Hall.
It’s easy to be sceptical about the scale of Butlers’ ambition in the midst of adversity. But for Hall, innovation is the only way to survive. “For a business to be going for a hundred years, you need that entrepreneurial flair. What starts out as a business in 1932 isn’t the same business that it is in 2024.”
He is in no doubt as to how hard that journey can be though, a reality the business continues to front up to as it strives to survive after disaster. “I liken it to rehab in the sense it isn’t sexy. It’s quiet graft, small steps, long-term progress.”
No comments yet