5 minutes with Honestly Tasty
We love to spotlight our fantastic suppliers so we sat down with Honestly Tasty to find out more about their Vegan Cheese passion and offering.
A brief history of your company, company values, and where and when it started.
Mike left uni with an MEng in Spacecraft Engineering – and now he’s making plant-based cheese that’s out of this world! After months of experimenting, Mike developed a now award-winning recipe for vegan blue cheese. It was too good not to share, so he closed the door on corporate banking and founded Honestly Tasty… The aim was, and is, to help change perception and drive a change in behaviour. Because whether you’re vegan, lactose intolerant, or simply like to try new things – we want to shake off the bad rep that alt dairy gets.
Using carefully selected ingredients, we bring together fresh thinking with traditional cheese-making techniques – so fast forward a few years, and we now offer a range of award-winning cheese alternatives, available online and via stockists around the UK – because we just don’t believe that ditching dairy should result in missing out!
Could you tell us a bit about the process behind making vegan cheese?
We combine traditional methods with new techniques, using carefully selected plant-based ingredients. We pasteurise, culture, and mature our products – hand flipping them daily where necessary and caring for them as dairy cheese mongers care for their products.
If you’re familiar with dairy cheese, you’ll know about casein – it plays a massive part in dairy cheese production and is mainly responsible for the key characteristics that a lot of vegan cheeses find tricky to emulate… for us, that’s where a starch structure comes in. We work hard to achieve the perfect ratio of starch against fats (finding the right balance and making sure that the emulsification binds together in a way that makes it possible to achieve different textures and mouthfeel at different temperatures, e.g. squished on a cracker, swirled into a sauce or melted on a pizza!
Tell us a little bit about what makes your products different/unique and why retailers should sell your alternative cheeses.
We draw from traditional cheese-making techniques. We pasteurise, culture, mature and rind-wash to create tastes and textures that people crave. Our alternatives perform like the dairy they’re styled on – melting, oozing, smushing, squishing – just as they should. No compromises.
With many options giving vegan cheese a bad name, we set out to make alternatives to get people talking – only this time, for the right reasons – because 29% of households now claim to be actively avoiding/reducing dairy – retailers must provide honestly tasty options.
The underlying drivers behind a boom in plant-based are health, the environment and animal welfare – and our plant-based Blue alone is responsible for 75% fewer carbon emissions than a dairy equivalent. That’s 411g CO2e fewer emissions in every 100g serving!
Focusing on dairy-free cheese taste is the leading barrier preventing trial, with this rejection often happening before consumption. We make award-winning plant-based cheese with cheese lovers in mind for people who want to cut out or down on dairy.
What is your bestselling, most-loved product?
They really do share the crown! Our Shamembert shines brightest in colder months (it bakes and oozes just like the cheese it’s styled on), and everyone loves a cranberry and “bree” toastie. Our Blue gets a lot of love all year round. Our newest cheese – Garlic & Herb – a creamy, crumbly gournay style, was crowned ‘best plant-based cheese’ at the Plant Based Taste Awards in November 2023 – we’ve actually had a lot of people tell us they prefer it to the dairy version, including lots of people that do eat dairy!
Are there any particular moments that make you incredibly proud? Have you won any awards, and what are these?
We still get fizzy with excitement every time we win an award! Scooping up ‘stars’ at the ‘Great Taste Awards’ last year was a real highlight – and seeing our product on physical shelves just never gets old. Reviews and feedback, too – they mean the world to us; when someone explains how our products make a positive impact on their life, that’s what it’s all about, really 🙂
Do you have any must-do tips for how to eat your cheeses, any specific pairings that you would recommend?
We do lots of recipe development to showcase our cheese (on our blog, here!) and we’ve worked with various drinks brands in the past to pair our cheeses with wines, beer and cider – like a pro! As a rule of thumb, though, they each pair similarly to the dairy versions, as the flavour profiles aren’t too far apart!
What tips would you give to retailers/delis/food service providers that stock your products? How it should they be kept, presented or displayed?
In delis especially – where possible – we recommend having the cheese ‘out’ and ‘on display’, e.g. a camembert in its box with the lid open to show the rind, perhaps a wedge of Blue poking out of its sleeve to highlight the mouldy rind. In general, though, we’ve worked hard on our packaging and shelf presence – styling it on dairy whilst giving it a unique personality – so that it attracts consumers from the get-go… and then ultimately, the taste will do the talking!
What’s your favourite product and why?
That’s like asking a parent who their favourite child is! We like to think there’s a reason ‘cheeseboards’ came about… so there’s no need to choose!
