‘Grate cheese robbery’: Jamie Oliver seeks help after Rs 3 crore cheddar theft

Nearly 22 tonnes of high-end, award-winning cheddar cheese were stolen from a dairy in London and celebrity British chef Jamie Oliver has sought help from his followers to solve the “grate cheese robbery”. Oliver, also known as the “Naked Chef”, asked his 10.5 million Instagram followers to be on the lookout for “lorry loads of very posh cheese”.
“There has been a great cheese robbery. Some of the best cheddar cheese in the world has been stolen,” Oliver wrote. Calling it a “brazen heist of shocking proportions”, Oliver said the stolen cheddar was worth about £300,000 (Rs 3,26,93,954) or over Rs 3 crore.
“If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong’uns,” Oliver said in his post.

Neal’s Yard Dairy, a distributor of British artisan cheese, delivered around 1,000 wheels of cheddar to alleged fraudsters who posed as a wholesale distributor for a major French retailer. It later found that it had been duped. The incident happened on October 21.
Cheddar, which is named after a village in south-west England where it originated, is the world’s best-known and one of the most expensive varieties of cheese.
The products that were swindled include Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar, and Pitchfork cheddar. The award-winning cheeses are among the most sought-after in the UK.
“I don’t know what they are going to do with it, really… Are they going to unpeel it from the cloth, and cut it and grate it and get rid of it in the fast food industry, in the commercial industry? It feels like a really weird thing to nick,” the celebrity chef further said.
The dairy has appealed to cheese lovers around the world to contact them if they have spotted the stolen cheese, particularly “clothbound cheddars” weighing around 10 kg or 24 kg.
The Scotland Yard and international agencies have launched a probe and a lookout for the culprits.