London’s Honestly Tasty has built a fiercely loyal fanbase with its delicious plant-based cheeses, with names like Chamembert, Brie, Veganzola and Herbivorsin (there’s vegan Facebook groups sharing tips on which store to stock up on soon), a break from their roots. And after the withdrawal order had to change the name!
The artisan brand received funding from Veg Capital last June and has since gone from strength to strength, securing listings in Ocado, Planet Organic, more than 70 independent stores and most recently in 166 Marks and Spencer stores nationwide with its Bleu, Schaumbert, and Brie. If you’re in the UK, we can’t recommend Blue highly enough.
HT says, “..if something as simple as cheese keeps people from going vegan, we owe it to ourselves and the planet to try!” And we’re all about it.
How did Honestly Tasty come to life?
Mike founded Honestly Tasty in 2018 after making a successful vegan diet and permanent lifestyle change. He couldn’t find a vegan cheese that he thought could compete with dairy, and he decided to solve that problem!
After an exploratory trip to Berlin, he set up camp in his gran’s kitchen – and it just evolved from there!
Tell us more about your vegan cheese making – what does it take to make an “honestly delicious” cheese product?
When Mike set out (and launched our first product, originally called Veganzola, now known as Blu… more on that later!) I think it’s fair to say that no one else in the UK made vegan cheese quite like it.
You may need to verify this, but I think he was the first to combine innovative methods with traditional cheesemaking techniques – cultivating vegan cheeses, hand flipping each one individually on a daily basis and leaving them to mature. Develop depth of flavor. It takes a lot of care, some nifty knowledge, and hey it’s cheesy – but a whole lot of love!
After receiving a cease and desist letter from a dairy corporation, you decide to change the name of some of your cheeses. Can you tell us a little about your story and why you decided to change the name of the products in question?
We recently read that the government is choosing not to “stand in the way of trading standards officers issuing restrictions on the marketing of dairy alternatives” and that is truly shocking.
We have yet to find a single person we misled and find it incredibly disappointing that we don’t have their support. Cutting down on meat and dairy is an important way to protect our planet, so it’s a real shame.
When we first launched, Mike thought of the name for our Vegan Blue and I believe it was a friend of his who actually coined the word ‘Veganzola’ – it stuck very quickly, because we love a pun. Down the road, we actually realized that the cheese itself is not particularly similar to Gorgonzola – apart from the fact that both are inoculated with Penicillum Roqueforti – so a name change made sense to us internally, but surely encouraged by the numerous pauses and pauses in an Italian law. Company letter!
To this day, they are still in our field only because the two have been compared in the past.
Then we have the brand new Garlic & Herb – an earlier iteration was called Herbivorcin. Brilliantly named after a short on Twitter and back by the brilliant Jane Fallon! Clearly inspired by dairy gornay cheese, we thought it was a great fit, until the letters started waving again, insisting we were causing confusion (this was before a well-known brand launched its own plant-based gornay!).
We were sad to see the name go, and shortened it to Herbie for a while – but it didn’t really make sense so as part of the recent relaunch, we saw fit to call it that.
The alt-dairy industry as a whole came under pressure with Amendment 171, which sought to ban “imitation or invention” of dairy products. What’s your view on big dairy’s controversial approach and what can alt-dairy brands do to prevent such amendments from being legalized?
The main argument people use to defend the word “cheese” is around its potential to confuse the public. It’s constantly being said that brands like us are tricking people into thinking our products are something else… like we’re not incredibly proud that we’re creating something new, revolting!
We think it’s pretty distorted, language evolves. No one is arguing about peanut butter? And it’s pretty hard to confuse people when we all prominently (and proudly!) say “vegan” or “100% plant-based” on our packaging and in all our comms. We want the right people to find us – like everyone marketing a product – and it feels pretty wild that there’s such a concerted effort to make it harder for us and the growing percentage of people who want to find us!
Vegan cheese continues to grow at OCADO with the vegan cheese category reporting a huge sales increase of 24% during Veganuary – how did you experience the growing demand for vegan cheese during Veganuary and what were your bestsellers?
I think vegan cheese is finally starting to lose its terrible reputation, which we’ve been doing since day one. You can now find three of our bestsellers in Ocado and M&S, massively increasing our online and in-store presence, increasing brand awareness and getting into baskets more than ever before!
Our Vegan Blue Cheese and Camembert Alternative (Chamembert) are both award winning and our Vegan Brie (Brie) is also a best seller. We’ve just launched our new Garlic & Herb which is nut and allergen free as well as being our most affordable cheese option – so we’re really excited to see it rise up the ranks too.
How are you looking to develop your B2B business in 2023?
We are trying to get as many people as we can to give our cheese a go! We want to encourage any changes, big or small, and recognize that they make a difference.
We have another mega announcement for the other side of summer, as we head back into official cheese season. But this year, our garlic and herbs have become a real summer contender; We are increasing visibility and availability nationwide and embarking on our journey to become nut-free.
Can you share any new innovations in the pipeline?
Definitely! Our nut free journey is a big one. Replacing almonds with potato and tapioca starches as well as vegetable protein combinations is huge for us.
By working with My Emissions, we recognized that one of the best ways to reduce our carbon emissions is to remove nuts from our cheese. As well as opening ourselves up to a whole new customer base, front and center decision-making was our impact on the environment.
But creating new recipes while maintaining or improving existing flavors and textures is (and is!) quite a journey. We have just launched Garlic and Herb, the rest should follow soon. We’re also looking at ways to fortify each cheese so it’s loaded with a little extra goodness. Watch this space!
Where to see Honestly Tasty in 5 years?
We want to be the leading producer of high-quality plant-based cheese. The past decade has seen a huge increase in delicious-tasting milk and meat alternatives, leaving a large, wedge-shaped gap in the market.
We launched Honestly Delicious in 2018 to fill that void – and not just to fill it, but to blaze a trail and prove that mouth-watering plant-based cheese is possible. After all, if something as simple as cheese is putting people off veganism, we owe it to ourselves and the planet to try!