Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses is still counting the cost of a devastating fire almost three years later, with the company posting its first loss in over a decade.
Turnover hit £18.2m in the year to September 2025, a slight increase on the year before but just 60% of pre-fire levels, according to Butlers latest accounts at Companies House.
Butlers lost a warehouse and hundreds of tonnes of cheese in a blaze in November 2023. Since then, it has moved production to a small nearby facility, but a host of extra outgoings meant it fell to a £400k pre-tax loss, down from a £13.9m profit a year earlier. It is the first time the company has posted a loss since 2012.
Matthew Hall, Butlers’ owner, said he expected the effects of the fire to continue for several years.
In February last year, Butlers secured planning permission for a new £15m “cheesemaking campus”, which will replace the buildings destroyed in the fire.
Hall said this marked an important milestone and would enable the business to bring its full operations back to the farm “where technology will meet tradition to protect our craft and support the future of British farmhouse cheesemaking”.
The facility will include buildings for cheesemaking, a new maturation shed, an area for product development and new offices.
Since 2023, Butlers has been operating from a makeshift factory a tenth of the space of its original. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out how complicated and time-consuming that’s going to be,” Hall told The Grocer in 2024.
“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 fire clearly took its toll on the business, with Hall describing the situation 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.”
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