Honestly Tasty: “We Want to Become the Leading Producer of High-Quality Plant-Based Cheese” – vegconomist
London’s Honestly Tasty has built up a fiercely loyal fanbase (there are vegan Facebook groups sharing tips on which stores to run to ASAP to stock up) with its delicious plant-based cheeses with names like Shamembert, Bree, Veganzola, and Herbivoursin – a few of which had to be renamed following cease and desist orders from their originals!
This artisan brand received funding from Veg Capital last June and since then has gone from strength to strength, securing listings at Ocado, Planet Organic, more than 70 independent stores, and most recently at 166 Marks and Spencer stores nationwide with its Blue, Shamembert, and Bree. If you’re in the UK, we cannot recommend the Blue highly enough.
HT says, “.. if something so simple as cheese is stopping people from giving veganism a go, 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 a successful Veganuary led to a permanent change in diet and lifestyle. There wasn’t one vegan cheese available that he thought rivalled its dairy counterpart, and he decided to fix that problem!
After an investigative trip to Berlin, he set up camp in his gran’s kitchen – and it all evolved from there!
© Honestly Tasty
Tell us more about the creation of your vegan cheeses – what does it take to make an “honestly tasty” cheese product?
When Mike set to work (and launched our first product, originally called Veganzola, now known as Blue… more on the later!) I think it’s fair to say that no one else in the UK was making vegan cheese in the same way.
You might need to fact-check this, but I think he was among the first here to combine novel methods with traditional cheese-making techniques – culturing vegan cheese, hand flipping each one individually on a daily basis, and leaving them to mature in order to develop depth of flavour. It takes a lot of care, some nifty knowledge, and hey it’s cheesy – but a…
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