How a cheese events business switched to a delivery service

Homage2Fromage was established in Yorkshire by cheese enthusiasts Vickie Rogerson and Nick Copland back in 2011.

Ms Rogerson told The Yorkshire Post: “We started out doing events in Leeds. Then we expanded into Sheffield, Manchester, York and Harrogate. We got some investment into the business last year and we were scaling it up.”

However, those plans came to a screeching halt as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown.

“We were doing 15 events a month and we planned to have that built up to 20 a month by the end of this year,” Ms Rogerson said. “It totally decimated our business overnight.

“We had to postpone all of our events. We didn’t see how we’d be able to run them again.”

She doesn’t think Homage2Fromage will be running any events until next year now but the business has stumbled across a demand for cheese boxes.

Ms Rogerson said: “We didn’t know how long lockdown was going to last. We thought we could postpone events and then put them back on again in May or June.

“When I think of that now it sounds mad but at the time we just thought lets take it day by day and see what happens. If we have to close the business then we’ll close the business.

“Me and Nick had always wanted to do a cheese box, we’d talked about it for years but it was never the right time.

“We thought we’ve got nothing to lose. Let’s just try and do a box of cheese, recreate our events that people know and love and put that in a box and send it out.

“We worked really hard to try and create something that was interesting and fun. It was blind cheese tasting and it was delivered to your door.

“We thought selling 50 or 60 boxes would keep us ticking over for the six to eight weeks of lockdown. After the first month we’d sold about 300 and now we’ve sold almost 1,500 boxes in total.”

The duo thought that the cheese boxes would prove popular with its loyal events fanbase but demand has seen Homage2Fromage’s popularity grow beyond the region.

“We thought we’d sell some but we were taken aback by how successful it has been and how it’s broadened out of our Yorkshire heartland to the rest of the country,” Ms Rogerson says. “We thought people would like it but we didn’t realise just how successful it would be.”

The cheese box business, launched at the beginning of April, has evolved over a short period of time.

“The first three to four months were a bit of a zeitgeist,” Ms Rogerson said. “Consumers were shopping differently, entertaining differently and we were the right product at the right time because people were in lockdown.”

She added: “Since lockdown has eased we’ve almost gone through the test and learn phase and now we’re going into the full start-up phase.”

Despite the success of the cheese boxes, the business still hopes to run events in the future.

Ms Rogerson said: “The boxes will be here to stay now. We’ve built that into such a good strong business.

“Eventually we will do both. We’ll still do events because that’s what we love but those events will be different to what they were before.

“We could do both. That’s our aim for next year. Whatever that next year looks like.”

She added: “What we want to achieve with the business is to introduce great cheese in a really fun way to people.”

Rock and roll approach to cheese

Homage2Fromage’s events are different to typical cheese and wine tasting, Vickie Rogerson says. They aim to cater to a wide audience and not just foodies or cheese aficionados.

Ms Rogerson said: “If you think of a normal cheese and wine tasting, we’d say that was like opera but our events were very much rock and roll. We wanted to make cheese accessible to everyone so that you didn’t feel like you needed to be a foodie or really know about cheese. That attracted an audience.”

Its first event back in 2011 also saw Alex James, Blur bassist and cheesemaker, attend.

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James Mitchinson