09/09/2026
Some of the best ideas start with a visit. In the years before 2012, Randolph Hodgson, then leading Neal’s Yard Dairy, travelled to Aurillac, in the mountains of central France, to meet Dr Marie-Christine Montel at her INRA cheese-research institute. He came back convinced that the enlightened thinking he’d encountered there, especially around raw-milk cheese, was something British producers and regulators needed to hear firsthand and suggested bringing those scientists to the UK. Bronwen Percival, who at that point was managing the cheese buying for Neal’s Yard Dairy, took the idea and ran with it, and the Science of Artisan Cheese conference was born.
Fourteen years and eight editions later, its mission is unchanged: to get makers, scientists and regulators into one room, and to find the places where a cheesemaker’s problems and science’s most interesting questions turn out to be one and the same.
Read more on The Science of Artisan Cheese Conference in our latest blog - link in bio.
