We've been making cheese in Barrys Bay the same way for over a hundred years.
To cut a long story short, when Barrys Bay Cheese produced its first cheddar in 1895, it was just one of nine small, family-owned dairy cooperatives dotted around Banks Peninsula. Life was quite a challenge then, so the original hard doers at Barrys Bay weren't alone in turning their hand to creating something useful from an abundant natural resource.
One by one, those little family dairy businesses eventually fell by the wheyside, so to speak, leaving the Barrys Bay factory near Duvauchelles as the last outpost of traditional cheese making on the Peninsula. To ensure the continuation of our cheese making tradition, we built a new factory at Barrys Bay in the early 1950s, the very same factory you come across today on your way to Akaroa.
Our milk comes from local cows. We don't know their names, but we know where they live.
At Barrys Bay, we still make a range of handcrafted cheeses the traditional way, using milk from grass-fed, Banks Peninsula Friesian cows. We're also the only New Zealand cheese maker still making cheddar using the original cheddaring process.
Sourcing our most important ingredient from a small number of farms in the same geographic area is one of the ways we ensure that every piece of our cheese tastes as good as the last. Being so close to the source of our most important ingredient also has implications for our cheese. Not many people know this, but milk doesn't like being jiggled about inside a milk tanker. So the less time it spends on the road, the better. By minimising the travel time from the farm to our factory, we do our best to preserve the unique flavour profile of the local milk that gives Barrys Bay cheese its distinctive taste.
