*UPDATED 21 September 2020*
Stock Levels & Cheese Availability
Stock levels are now starting to return to normal, and over the next few weeks you should see more of our regular cheeses appearing in the shop in 500g wedges.
Unfortunately our Saturday deliveries have been beset by problems and delays. As our cheese must be maintained in a cool temperature and delivered promptly, we are sadly going to need to stop offering Saturday deliveries are we are simply not confident about the reliability of a Saturday courier service.
*Updated 15 August*
If you’ve been keeping an eye on our online cheese store you’ll have noticed that while we’ve had lots of ‘Cooking Cheese’ available, our main cheeses have been out of stock for a while. The reason for this is a combination of phenomenal online sales during lockdown, and a steeper-than-expected learning curve for us in controlling the temperature of our new cheese store in a low carbon way.
When the temperature rises, as it has done recently, cheese ripens much faster and in a more unpredictable way. So that’s meant that during the summer we’ve had batches where we haven’t been happy with quality of the cheese compared to our normal, which is why they’ve been sold as cooking cheese. The good news is that we’re making progress in managing the this, so we’re now starting to see batches that we are happy with coming through in a more predictable way.
Cheddar is now available again, and we have plenty of Barolocco Blue and Cooking Cheese available. We have modest stocks of our core cheeses, which are being sold in the Taster Packs or for Subscriptions. We’re about a month behind where we wanted to be in restocking our online shop, but you should start to see our normal cheese range returning to the website as 500g wedge options over the next month.
The other change we’ve made to our online cheese shop is rethinking delivery options. We are now able to offer Saturday delivery. There is no additional charge for this, but we have dropped the Thursday delivery option. So you can now schedule delivery on either a Wednesday or a Saturday.
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*Updated 2 July 2020*
For the next few weeks our cheese availability remains low.
The reason is that at the start of the year our milk has a very low fat content because all the cows have their calves with them. We naturally get less milk, but the cows, cleverly, give us skimmed milk and keep the cream for their calves.
In previous years we have made our standard cheeses with the low fat milk, but we were rarely happy with the quality. This year we decided to experiment with new cheeses made from the low fat milk, hence the birth of the 'Skinny' range.
We are hoping to be able to restock some of our 'core' cheeses in later this month. Cheddar is expected to return in late July or early August 2020, for Carrick it could be September before we have it available in any volume. Due to very low availability of our standard cheeses we may sometimes need to make substitutions in the Taster Packs and Cheesy Night In - please in mind, if you are ordering any of these products, that the cheeses you receive may differ from the cheeses pictured.
We have some Cooking Cheese available. This is a batch of cheese that hasn't met our quality standards, usually because the texture isn't quite right. It's great for cheese sauces, cheese on toast and sandwiches, not perfect enough for cheeseboards.
Most of our limited edition 'test' batches from our low fat winter milk are now sold out. We will have limted quantities of Skinny Red making a return soon, and you might find it popping up as a substitution in Taster Packs and Selection Packs.
Delivery & Packaging
While we always request overnight delivery, we are unable to guarantee it - on occasion our couriers may be a day late in delivering your package. Please be reassured that our insulated packaging and chill packs have been designed to accommodate a 48 hour delivery window. Therefore, if you receive your cheese a day later than expected, the cheese will be absolutely fine.
During the extremely hot weather recently some of our packages have become damaged in transit because of condensation. While we try to minimise use of plastic at all times, in future hot spells we may need to return to plastic rather than paper envelopes. We are exploring other solutions for packaging, but for now, hot weather might result in your delivery arriving plastic wrapped.
If you need to contact us, please email rather than phone. You can reach us on hello@theethicaldairy.co.uk. If you would prefer to speak to us by phone, please email us and provide your phone number, and we’ll give you a call back.
Thank you.