The UK's First Solar Powered State of the Art Cheese Store

The new state of the art cheese store at our Wincanton site has just reached completion; allowing space for an extra 1,762 pallets of cheese along with improve storage and dispatching facilities. The new store is 2500 times the size of grandma Ivy Clothier’s original store on the farm in Wyke Champflower, with the additional space to store approximately 2000 tonnes of additional capacity to help meet the required demands of ever growing export sales particularly in vintage flavour profiles. In order to replicate the secret recipe as closely as possible the new store is uniquely temperature controlled at 12 degrees to reproduce that of Ivy’s stone maturing barn on the farm.

Further investment has also gone into our 100% green sustainability plan to ensure the new building is highly energy efficient. Our fifth business solar array set of 65kw brings us closer to fulfilling our commitment to position solar on all south facing roofs where we use daytime power. As a business our commitment to green energy is one aspect of the 100% green sustainability plan that has enabled us to dramatically reduce carbon footprint and become the first national cheddar brand to be 100% self-sufficient through the use of energy generated from solar and biogas on site.

Richard Clothier, Managing director said “reducing carbon is essential for all businesses and installing solar panels is an easy, cost effective way to do just that…The principles of sustainability are at the heart of all of our business decisions as seen from the continual development of our green portfolio over the last 10 years. Cheddar is a natural food produced from grass; using the power of nature to age it in a way that has a positive impact on the environment is intuitively the best way to do it”