Who we are

Martin worked at Neal’s Yard Dairy selling cheese for 15 years before deciding to leave London to set up as a cheesemaker to pursue the romantic idea of making something handmade that people would enjoy and talk about. He spent a year making cheese with his friends at Trethowan Brothers as training whilst working with Hazel on getting Pevensey Cheese Company on it’s feet.

Hazel’s family are beef and lamb farmers in East Sussex. Their native Sussex herd conservation graze the Pevensey Levels on behalf of the Wildlife Trust. After 15 years selling fruit and salad veg to supermarkets, Hazel decided it was time to put her energy into building something of her own, in the form of a family and making cheese - finding Martin’s infectious love of cheese too hard to resist!

Hazel’s parents kindly lent us a small part of their fodder shed to turn in to the Pevensey cheese rooms. Without their generosity and support our dream wouldn’t have been made a reality.

Building our 60 metre square cheese rooms and kitting it out with all the stainless steel we needed would not have been possible without a 40% grant from LEADER - an EU fund to support rural businesses. Thank you to Don Cranfield at the Wealden and Rother Rural Partnership for his patient guidance sponsoring us through the process.

Martin fell in love with cheese and the British and Irish cheese making community through his 15 year career at this incredible establishment. Naturally his previous employers have provided a great forum for the trial and development of the cheese; tasting batches that vary from the nearly sublime to the shamefully ridiculous, offering advice, coming to visit and for moral support when met with technical issues, and finally for their custom from the earliest days.

Tony at The Cheese Man was very quick to reach out to us to become our cheese ambassador in the South East of England and to get our cheese to local delis and shops. Thanks to him and his merry drivers for their enthusiasm in distributing our cheese.